When do we need PCI Express?

[Birger]

When are we gonna need PCI Express, or for that matter AGP 8x?

I mean, if we buy a good graphics card today, like an ATI Radeon 9800 XT, or a next generation card tomorrow with the R420 GPU from ATI, those cards already got 256 Mb of RAM on them so we don't need to use our ordinary RAM to store textures and stuff to our graphic card there.

And since we have 256 Mb of memory in our graphic cards today, and that amount of memory are gonna be sufficient for a long time to come, where is the meaning of having a PCI Express bus and card instead of an "old" AGP 4x card when it comes to performance?

In cheap computer systems, that have an IGP on the motherboard, I understand the point of having a PCI Express bus so that the graphics in our games don't get to slow.
But, when are we gonna NEED a faster bus than the AGP 4x in a performance PC, since we never ever want to use our ordinary and extremely slow RAM (compared to the speed of the memory in our graphic cards) to store any info about the graphics in our games anyway?

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

I predict that AGP8X will be the main bottleneck in about 2 years time.. better to start now than later.

 

[Birger]

Hello JeremiahTheGreat.

I saw that you thought that the AGP 8x interface would be the main bottleneck in a couple of years and I got a question about that. Why do you think that the AGP 8x bus would be to slow in the future?

I mean, what we want to have is more and faster RAM on our graphic cards, not a faster Bus like the PCI Express that still is really underpowered and slow compared to the speed between the graphic cards own memory and the GPU?

Another thing, since we have 256 Mb of RAM on our graphic cards today I believe that we are gonna see some even more powerful graphic cards in the future with an amazing (today at least) 512 Mb of RAM on them, maybe even on a 512 bit path between the GPU and the graphic cards memory.

 

[akshayt]

256mb will be optimized not for more than a yr.
i think the latest games like painkiller and farcry run a little better on8x.games like unreal 2,ut 2003,gta 4 don't show much performance boost with 8x.

for optimized performance you'll need pci express by end of this yr or beginning of next yr.