Hi im a noob here. Just wondering why people wants to wait for the PCI-express over AGP. is it faster?
whats the advantage of PCI-express over AGP?
- Thread starter reposado2
- Start date
No ones holding their breath over PCi-express.
It provides larger bandwidth, yes. It should be a little faster due to latency, yes. Otherwise, little to no performance difference over AGP 4X/8X.
The only issue I have with PCI-express is when buying a new AGP card now, and trying to hold onto the card for a year or two, motherboards may no longer carry AGP ports (so if you upgrade your whole rig, good bye X800/Geforce6)
It provides larger bandwidth, yes. It should be a little faster due to latency, yes. Otherwise, little to no performance difference over AGP 4X/8X.
The only issue I have with PCI-express is when buying a new AGP card now, and trying to hold onto the card for a year or two, motherboards may no longer carry AGP ports (so if you upgrade your whole rig, good bye X800/Geforce6)
gsellis
Diamond Member
- Dec 4, 2003
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Yes, it is faster. For what most people do here, they will not notice. For some speciality things such as high definition video editing using the GPU to display the effects in real-time and render them, it does make enough of a difference according to Intel, ATI, and Pinnacle.
PCI-Express it self will improve alot of other things. Right now your hard drives and ethernet ports on a measly 133MB/s bus. Put GigaBitE a RAID Array (Not that you would in this kind of system) or a TV-Tuner and sound card its going to be clogged up with PCI-Express it going to be much better
I dont see how soundcards or TV cards can improve with PCi-express. Sound will always be sound, and the TV will always be the TV.
vshah
Lifer
- Sep 20, 2003
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pci express (for graphics) has the ability to transfer data both ways, to and from the graphics card, which holds potential for offloading some system tasks to the gpu and stuff. in terms of game performance, it will be an insignificant hit for the time being.
-Vivan
-Vivan
But with PCI-E, they won't eat up PCI bus bandwidth that, say, your hard drives or Ethernet card could be using. This becomes especially important if you are doing multichannel audio or HDTV encoding/decoding, and for systems with very fast RAID arrays or multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections. For your basic PC, however, it won't do much, but it does greatly simplify motherboard layouts (since it requires far fewer traces than PCI). Also, eventually they'll ditch AGP and legacy PCI, so there will be only one kind of add-on card for PCs (which makes the northbridge/southbridge hardware simpler, and just generally makes more sense).
gsellis
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Don't be so sure on the TV front. You could use both the CPU(s) and the video card to render animation in real-time in HD then send it back to the card to go out to a HDTV. I don't mean playing video, I mean rendering something like a game and then displaying it. That would possibly require that much bandwidth. It is not here yet, but if there is a market and a way...
PCI-e might be able to handle the audio in 1 lane currently. But, we are doing practically nothing in audio. Think of one of those jungle scenes in FarCry. What if they gave it a full jungle experience? 200 tree frogs, 100 birds, the wind in the 200 trees and shrubs, wind on water, waterfalls, etc. Lets add all of these 'voices' and give them a distance, direction and loudness in space around the character. I think we Audio Processor Units now
Originally posted by: gsellis
Don't be so sure on the TV front. You could use both the CPU(s) and the video card to render animation in real-time in HD then send it back to the card to go out to a HDTV. I don't mean playing video, I mean rendering something like a game and then displaying it. That would possibly require that much bandwidth. It is not here yet, but if there is a market and a way...
PCI-e might be able to handle the audio in 1 lane currently. But, we are doing practically nothing in audio. Think of one of those jungle scenes in FarCry. What if they gave it a full jungle experience? 200 tree frogs, 100 birds, the wind in the 200 trees and shrubs, wind on water, waterfalls, etc. Lets add all of these 'voices' and give them a distance, direction and loudness in space around the character. I think we Audio Processor Units now
Interesting.. heh.
The reason I am waiting is because PCI-Express is the newer interface. There will only be more and more support for it in the future. AGP and PCI are old technology. They will be phased out. As far as your video card is concerned, it will not be any faster than PCI-Express, but future upgrades will be easier if you have a PCI-Express motherboard.
Originally posted by: gsellis
Don't be so sure on the TV front. You could use both the CPU(s) and the video card to render animation in real-time in HD then send it back to the card to go out to a HDTV. I don't mean playing video, I mean rendering something like a game and then displaying it. That would possibly require that much bandwidth. It is not here yet, but if there is a market and a way...
PCI-e might be able to handle the audio in 1 lane currently. But, we are doing practically nothing in audio. Think of one of those jungle scenes in FarCry. What if they gave it a full jungle experience? 200 tree frogs, 100 birds, the wind in the 200 trees and shrubs, wind on water, waterfalls, etc. Lets add all of these 'voices' and give them a distance, direction and loudness in space around the character. I think we Audio Processor Units now
Agreed. I use to be one of those ignorant ones who claimed that audio is a very minor componet of the video game experience. Now I know better.
gsellis
Diamond Member
- Dec 4, 2003
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Just reenforcing ... There is a quote in the introduction to DVInfo.net's audio section that really applies.
I shelled out about a grand on audio equipment for my DV camera and I am not done yet. I was going to get 2.1 audio on my new workstation until I realized I might have to force some stuff into 5.1 and Surround headphones are not yet practical (yes, I know about Zalman's, that is why I said it
) So much to learn, so little time... Oops... drifting. Sorry.
To sum up, PEG's (PCI Express for Graphics) theoretical advantages are:
1) Greater bandwidth.
2) Full bidirectional speed (as opposed to AGP, which was essentially one-way from CPU to GPU).
3) Provides more power through the slot, thus less need for external power connectors.
But I think games have to be designed to take advantage of PEG's plusses before we'll see significant speed differences between two equally-clocked cards, one on PEG and one on AGP. People want PEG mainly for a clearer upgrade path, as high end GPUs will likely begin to more fully exploit PEG in a generation (or sooner).
1) Greater bandwidth.
2) Full bidirectional speed (as opposed to AGP, which was essentially one-way from CPU to GPU).
3) Provides more power through the slot, thus less need for external power connectors.
But I think games have to be designed to take advantage of PEG's plusses before we'll see significant speed differences between two equally-clocked cards, one on PEG and one on AGP. People want PEG mainly for a clearer upgrade path, as high end GPUs will likely begin to more fully exploit PEG in a generation (or sooner).
For GPUs, you would need a video architecture that is made to take advantage of the bandwith of PCIE. Current video cards are designed to avoid using the AGP bus as muc as possible due to the high latencies and relatively slow main memory speeds. Once we start using high bandwith memory at higher speeds, it will be possible to start using it for video purposes.
It still wouldn't be ideal. Any high performance game (ie. FPS) would still want to stay within the bounds of the onboard video RAM because while PCI-Express is fast, it's still a turtle compared to video RAM. I could see it have some use with MMORPGs, since textures are generally more compact (although more numerous) and gameplay is slower, they could use it to stream data so that there's no load time between major areas/world/cities/etc. But then again, the MMORPG genre is the slowest to adopt new technology. By the time a developer took advantage of that, the next step in subsystem bandwidth would be just around the corner and this year's hardware would be too slow anyway.
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