PCI-E bandwidth advantage vs. AGP

[boatillo]

I remember a couple years back when PCI-E boards and cards just hit the market I saw some tests run that proved even the most graphically challenging game at that time did not max out the bandwidth that AGP 8x provided. In fact I think I remember the number being maybe 60-70% of AGP bandwidth used in the most demanding game, with most games falling a good deal below that.

I doubt anyone has done an updated analysis, but it would be interesting to see how a 16x PCI-E x1950 card would use bandwidth vs. the 8x AGP version of the same card in more modern games. Heck it would be interesting to see how much of that PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth Crysis uses up too.

 

[zephyrprime]

Any game that uses a lot of bandwidth is either written extremely poorly or is running on a video card that doesn't have enough memory.