AGP 8x - a marketting gimick ?

[Darius]

I heard that the 8x AGP is sort of useless for most of todays computers, and that we're not yet at the standards for using the full potential of the 8x capabilities... is this true ? Can you expand ?

[JigPu]

Right now, 8x AGP (and to some extent even 4x) does virtually nothing for performance. What the 8x measures is a bandwith increase from the standard 1x AGP. This bandwith is used when information must be transfered from main memory or the CPU to the card. However, it isn't used all that often because of the amount of memory that video card's have onboard now.

There are few games that need or have more than 128MB of textures loaded all at once, so the only time the bandwith is really used is when pre-loading textures. And since it's pre-loading instead of demand-loading, framerates won't decrease because of needed data being sent over a slow bus.

In the future when games have more textures, and more textures loaded simultanously in memory, the bus will become more imporatant since these textures will need to be loaded more often, but not currently.

JigPu

[DDR-PIII]

yep thats all it is :)

[CamH]

Originally posted by JigPu


In the future when games have more textures, and more textures loaded simultanously in memory, the bus will become more imporatant since these textures will need to be loaded more often, but not currently.



But we're also starting to see cards with 256MB RAM onboard. So, as the amount of textures increase, the amount of onboard RAM a card has will probably increase with it.

[bluestreakLB]

Another thing to add that people often overlook is that even in the event that your AGP bus is needed, the bandwidth is so much smaller then that of the onboard ram that your frame rate would most likely drop to a level that isnt playable with any form factor.

PCI express however will most likely change this, but as CamH said, and i tend to agree...games come out that require more ram, thus cards come out with more ram. Heck i remember when 32mb of ram was "enough", i'm glad that Nvidia and ATI upgraded along with the software, otherwise i would be relying on that SLOW 8x agp bus....