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The unknow future of AGP8X

Le Québécois

Senior member
I did some research but none of them gave me a clear answer to my question....

Whats in the future for AGP...is the current video card generation the last one to use it?
 
Four or more factors control speed in a computer.

The ones I can think of are:

BUS
CPU
Memory
and GPU

I think once at least three of the other factors exceed AGP 8x transfer rates then your AGP system will need to be replaced. By that time so will the rest of you computer parts.
Just like how it took original PCI card years to finally die, AGP will take years to phase out as well. I'm estimating at least 2 more generations of video cards to pass before AGP really becomes obsolete.
 
Not at all. There are still way too many AGP systems. You'll see them for this gen and the refresh in all flavors. Next gen probably also but after that the premiere cards in the lineups will be PCI-E only but lower end cards will still continue to come in AGP.
 
Originally posted by: OhHenry
My question is have they fully use AGP8x to its fullest potential?
No, current cards only benefit slightly from 8x over 4x.

One reason old-PCI disappeared so quickly for video cards was that PCI was just too slow to support newer cards properly. At half the bandwidth of AGP 1x, performance of PCI geforce2 and 2mx cards was much lower than AGP.

AGP is different, cards aren't even maxing out 8x so there is no reason to stop offering high-performance AGP cards until PCI-E has been around another year or two, and midrange AGP cards should be available for at least 3-4 years.

 
Originally posted by: OhHenry
My question is have they fully use AGP8x to its fullest potential?


yes, but very rarely, and it wouldn't hurt performance (bottlenecking). The main benifit of PCI-express is the fact that it supports SLi, and can supply 110w of power instead of 45w to the gpu.
 
Originally posted by: OhHenry
I also notice that some PCI-E cards are cheaper then their AGP counterparts, why is that?
Because they have more supply and/or lower demand, and for some designs they don't need extra PCI-to-AGP bridge logic.

For some cards it's the other way around, 6800GT was much more expensive on PCI-E when first available.
 
so right now, PCIe and AGP is about the same but PCIe can max out higher? so until most cards max out on AGP, they will still be around and have the same speed as the PCIe counterpart?
 
PCI-e's advantages over AGP 8X, at least for video cards, is largely due to the fact that it's a better type of interconnect. Eventually PCI-e will replace PCI and AGP.

As long as you have a system with an AGP card that's worth upgrading, upgrade options will be available. That's how the market works.
 
Not for a while.

Tough time for manufactuers though to keep both lines but if they offer PCI-E only today they will cut off a large market segment.
 
It really depends on what happens in the processor arena. If the high end of the CPU market quickly transitions over to dual core processors that are only available in packages that typically require you to team up those processors with PCIe motherboards (LGA775, s939 and eventually M2), then you will likely see the market for high end AGP cards evaporate. The reason for this is that in a year's time it will become increasingly hard to find s478 and s754 processors that won't bottleneck the new high end cards (R520 and G70/80). Sure, there will probably be a few oddball boards that use the new sockets and chipsets with AGP, but those will probably fade away over time as PCIe becomes more entrenched. Eventually the card makers will start cutting back on AGP production, which will then cause the AGP card prices to jump and make them even less attractive compared to an upgrade to a PCIe mobo.

I'm actually willing to bet that AGP will disappear before PCI does, simply because Dell is still to this day cranking out the cheap Celeron boxes with no video upgrade path beyond a PCI add in card. Even after the full conversion of the gamer market over to PCIe cards in a few years, you'll probably still have some stripped down chipset for the budget PC market with onboard graphics, a silkscreen of where the x16 slot would go if your computer didn't suck and a single lonely old school PCI slot below the x1 slots that will keep PCI graphics alive for a few more years.

The really big thing that was holding back adoptioon of PCIe at first was the suckitude of the Prescott P4s, which was your only game in town processor-wise when PCIe was introduced last year. Now that the nForce 4 mobos are going mainstream and the s939-only Athlon X2s are coming, you soon are geting to the point where it would be just silly to consider spending $500 on the successors to the 6800s and X850s without doing a PCIe system upgrade in the process.
 
I think the up comming generation will be the last of the high end for AGP. Seems like Intel and AMD mobo's are pretty much only PCI-Express and I doubt they will be making any new AGP chipsets.
 
Originally posted by: JBT
I think the up comming generation will be the last of the high end for AGP. Seems like Intel and AMD mobo's are pretty much only PCI-Express and I doubt they will be making any new AGP chipsets.

Yeah... I think the reason PCI cards stuck around so long is because there were still PCI slots on motherboards.
 
They may still make agp chipsets because if you really think about it pci-express is pretty pointless right now it'll prolly be useful in 3-5 years
 
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