<< As for PCI to AGP....there is a major difference!! Although the cards may be the same the AGP card will run on average 2-3 times faster than the same PCI card. The bus on the AGP slot is specially designed to send video faster. >>
I have never heard this before Keith?? Could you point me towards where you got this info?? I hope it wasn't from a "salesperson".... or else he/she did a great sales job on you!!
AGP graphics cards usually won't improve performance over PCI graphics cards by more than 10%. The AGP cards primary added feature is that it provides a "fast pipeline" between the graphics card and your RAM. What this means is that if your graphics card has 8 Megs of RAM on it, but the current graphics require more than 8, the graphics card can patch in to the regular RAM on your computer and use it to help display graphics.
When buying an AGP card, it is important to note what type of AGP it supports! AGP comes in various "speeds". 1X AGP pretty much just means that you have a PCI card that will fit in an AGP slot. 2X AGP will provide minimal improvements over the same PCI card. 4X will start to provide significant improvements. However, I don't know of any AGP cards that support 4X AGP yet?? Most tend to be 2X AGP right now.
The 1X, 2X and 4X refers to the speed at which the graphics card can "talk" to the RAM in your computer. Don't take this as "fact" (because it has been a while since I read this stuff)... but I believe that 1X communicates at 256K, 2X at 512K, and 4X at 1024K. The problem with 1X and 2X is that the communication path to the RAM is still too slow to really get much benefit from using the computer's RAM to display large graphics. It would be just as fast for the video card to process the image in "chunks" itself (the large image would take several processing cycles on the video card).
AGP will truly be useful once 4X AGP and up graphics cards are on the market.
Right now AGP is most helpful for people viewing large graphics or using large spreadsheets, etc.
I believe a good site to read up on AGP would be "Tom's Hardware Guide" tomshardware.com
It is an amazing source of information when it comes to computer components (processors, graphics cards, motherboards, RAM, etc...)
At this point in time AGP is essentially a marketing ploy by Intel (who inventing AGP)... My guess is that they wanted to introduce AGP just to get it established as the "norm", even though it isn't truly a large improvement yet. Future AGP devices will take advantage of the possibilities though, and at that point AGP will be a useful new technology.
Chad |
