Would someone even notice if they were using their 9700 on a 4x AGP board (instead of an 8x)?

[Wingznut]

Or is there really no difference?

 

[RedShirt]

Considering that the board has 128MB RAM.... And that the only game that MAY stress that is Doom3, I'm gonna have to say no.

 

[Insane3D]

I would like to see the 9700 tested on an AGP 8X motherboard to see if the performance increases at all. Is there even any AGP 8X capable mobo's out yet? AFAIK, the KT400 and the Nforce 2 will be the first with this available.

 

[Rand]

In my experience most modern games the difference between AGP 2X to AGP 4X tends to be roughly 0-6% in my experience, with a slight trend towards the lower half of that.

I don't see the design of consumer 3D rendering/gaming applications changing enough within the next year or so to dramatically change that profile, so for the immediate future I don't believe AGP 8X to be much more then a chckbox feature for OEM's to hype.

Beyond that we will be hitting the crest of a few newish technologies which will gradually become maintream and could potentially influence the impact of AGP transfers, so it's difficult to guess what we may see in 1.5-2 years.

In the Pro3D market I do definitely see it as potentially impacting performance to some degree almost immediately. We've already seen that high edn Pro 3D boards can see upwards of 12-17% boosts in performance from AGP 4X over AGP 2X. The improvement to AGP 8X will almost surely see diminishing improvements, but it'll likely be appreciable nonetheless.

Nonetheless, such improvements are still quite unusual in most applications and primarily relegated to the high end Pro3D hardware, the mid-range boards up to about $1000-1200 likely won't be put in a position in which they would see such benefits.

 

[Wingznut]

Originally posted by: Insane3D
Is there even any AGP 8X capable mobo's out yet? AFAIK, the KT400 and the Nforce 2 will be the first with this available.

Yeah, the SiS648 chipset is 8X AGP.

My friend is building a P4-2.53ghz system around the ATI 9700 Pro. And although I didn't think that 8X was an issue, I figured I'd ask the pros (and Rand, too... I guess. ).

 

[Wolfsraider]

good question since no benchmarks are available on 8x agp(that i know of)
and since it scales so high i also wonder which processors they will support with 8x agp
p-3 p-4 athlon thunderbird palamino or will it mainly be the upper end of the spectrum?
with doom3 coming 80 mb of textures seems like a lot and a definate test is in order
unless as usual i am way off the mark here and looking at the specs wrong in whick case my fellow anandtechers can correct me as usual
mike

 

[BFG10K]

AGP x4 should be fine for the next generation of games like Unreal2 and Doom3. As CPUs and RAM get faster you might start to notice a small performance delta but it's probably nothing to lose any sleep over.

 

[First]

Wingz, you'll know soon enough.

 

[Mavrick007]

I didnèt think they were doing that with the initial offering of the 9700 but that it was supposed to be done on the next revision when they drop the process down, or is is going to be on the Pro

I donèt see how you can have any difference at least until thereès something that will stress the graphics adapter. Right now the 9700 is getting pretty high framerates so I donèt think there will be difference til the next gen games (like Doom 3, possibly Unreal 2 as well).

 

[Rand]

I figured I'd ask the pros (and Rand, too... I guess. ).

Watch out Wingz, I'm still stalking you
j/k

 

[Insane3D]

Originally posted by: Rand

I figured I'd ask the pros (and Rand, too... I guess. ).

Watch out Wingz, I'm still stalking you
j/k

:Q:Q

<--remembers to always be nice to Rand.

 

[Jaylllo]

I saw a linked article on slashdot.org Basically it babbles about how the agp bus is inefficient and whatnot.

I mean how much main memory texture is transfered to begin with? Given the speed of video card chip memory, I don;t think 8x & 4x
agp will make much of a difference since the latency and low throughput (relative to onboard video memory). Assuming you even use that much video bandwidth? here

 

[ElFenix]

i went into this a while back... in most situations there isn't enough available memory bandwidth to get the CPU its share and then even saturate 4x agp. 2x, yeah, 4x, no. you'd have to have a lot more mem bandwidth than FSB width to see any difference (nforce, anyone).