VideoCards:AGP 8x vs PCI-Expres

[Rarasaurus]

Which is better and why? Agp or PCI? VIDEO CARDS...

[BerserkerCatSplat]

PCI-ex. AGP will be gradually phased out to accoommidate PDI-E cards, as they allow for better bandwidth than the AGP 8X port. The price differences are rather minimal, anyway. My ideal motherboard would be Socket 939 with PCI-E.

[koopkoop2]

Originally posted by Rarasaurus
Which is better and why? Agp or PCI? VIDEO CARDS...

PCI-E is better because it has the POTENTIAL to be faster. In reality, there is NO PERFORMANCE GAIN until all the bottlenecks to utilizing all that extra bandwidth are removed. Hell, they've barely managed to fully utilize the bandwidth provided by AGP 4X. As demonstrated in this chart:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040310/images/image009.gif


Here's a good article explaining EVERYTHING about Pci-E.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040310/index.html

Here's the key quote:
"In consideration of our theoretical forecasts and all the question marks we've raised, it's hard to reach a conclusion. On the one hand, the new bus opens the door for many new possibilities in the world of graphics cards. On the other hand, it will take some time before the casual user will see any advantages in the form of improved performance. 3D games aren't designed to utilize the greater transfer rates yet, and even if they did, the question remains how much of an impact the greater bandwidth of PCI Express will really have."

[hampstor]

yep, there was no need to really move to PCI-E x16 video cards as most cards haven't even saturated AGP8x...

you'll see more of a benefit moving from a PCI gigabit nic to a PCI-E gigabit nic then from an AGP8x card to a PCI-E x16 card.