I first ran into PCI Express (PCI-E) video by accident in 2006. I bought a motherboard and was rather annoyed to discover it didn’t support AGP. :dubious: That was an $90 mistake. I already owned several AGP cards. I was forced to buy a PCI-E card that I hadn’t figured into my cost estimate.
AGP is still popular. The current standard is AGP 8x.
PCI slot graphics were popular 15 years ago. AGP replaced the old PCI graphics cards.
So why develop PCI-E? I read somewhere it supported copywrite protection? Software can turn off the video out jacks? I never checked to see if this is true.
For Aero Glass in Vista and Win7 which graphics hardware format is better?
Video? Gaming?
Is one format better for say gaming and worse for Aero?
I googled “AGP Card” and got a lot of hits from various companies.
Odd. That they are all AGP 8x.
I didn’t see any AGP 16x cards for sale. AGP 16x never got past the drawing board.
It’s the motherboards that matter. If most motherboards support PCI-E then AGP will die off. I have at least 8 AGP cards I salvaged that are useless now.
AGP is not still popular. Rather, there are just a lot of old machines out there.
AGP is dead, simply put.
So why PCIe? It’s all about bandwidth. Bi-directional bandwidth. About 3 times as much.
Modern GPU’s and tuners require large amount of bandwidth to move data from/to the CPU/RAM.
BTW, all modern GPU’s require a PCIe slot. There are still last gen versions that support AGP, but they are expensive compare to their PCIe counterpart.
If you look at the product list on Newegg, you can find AGP cards for sale, but they’re all older models. link
Probably the best card on that last is the Radeon 4670 - which was not the top of the line card even when it was new. Now, it’s two years old and it can’t do DirectX 11, which is the latest standard. The reason it’s expensive is because supply is limited, not from demand. Going forward, towards dX12 and beyond, you will not be able to find AGP cards that run that standard.
Bottom line: learn to love your new PCI-e masters.
My old AGP video card died a year or two ago and since I didn’t want to upgrade my MB (and therefore CPU and therefore …), I really had to shop around for a basic AGP replacement. (I don’t do graphics games or such so I just wanted a $30 card.) The local computer superstores didn’t even have them. Had to order online.
AGP is not just dead, it’s been dead for some time.
PCI-E is much faster than AGP. AGP is undead, but it’ll take a while for it to disappear altogether.
Aero Glass is low end 3D gimmickery that any average graphics card can handle, even most of the crappy integrated ones that laptops and netbooks come with. It’s marketing, not technology, and plenty of last-decade computers should be able to handle it just fine.
Video typically depends more on your CPU or on your actual graphics card, not your bus. Most modern systems can handle non-HD video just fine, and increasingly they’re able to deal with BluRay and compressed 1080p video too.
For gaming, you definitely want PCI-E. AGP can’t keep up with current-generation games, much less future ones.
In the early days of PCI-E, some high-end AGP cards were more powerful, but that shouldn’t be the case any longer. Any PCI-E card you get these days will easily be able to handle Aero, and all but the cheapest ought to handle any video the average person (i.e. non media professional/home theater PC fanatic) would come across. You shouldn’t even be able to buy AGP cards at most places anymore, and even if you can, don’t.
I should’ve said this in my last post: AGP and PCI-E are largely irrelevant unless you’re gaming. Both are perfectly capable of Aero and most video. PCI-E just offers a lot more bandwidth, which only really matters if you’re pushing a lot of 3D data across, i.e. gaming or doing some other type of realtime 3D rendering. That said, PCI-E is simply superior to AGP and there’s reason to stick with AGP unless you have old components that require it.
thanks. I’ve mostly been upgrading pc’s the past few years. Didn’t realize the race between AGP and PCIe was over.
Doesn’t make me feel to good seeing a major technology come and go in my career. I still remember the plain pci graphics cards in the early 1990’s. I still got a few in a box somewhere.
I still have a VESA local bus (VLB) motherboard and expansion cards too. I needed the case for a new pc and boxed up the VESA system 15 years ago. My VLB graphics card was top of the line back then.
PCI and VLB fought it out for several years. The company behind PCI had more $$$ and eventually took over the market.
Even my 4 year old computer has PCI-E, although the integrated video is actually AGP, I believe. It’s always annoyed me that I couldn’t use the AGP card I already had to hook it up to a TV.
I had the same thing happen to me. I bought a new computer in 2001. My old PCI graphics card couldn’t work in it, so I had to buy an AGP card. When I bought my new computer in 2006, I had to buy a new PCI-E card. My AGP card is in the drawer.
My computer I bought in 2006 was a bargain. Turned out that was because they were selling off the last of their stock still using AGP, because PCIe had already taken over. I knew nothing of this change of standard, so later when a new video card was a requirement for certain software to run, I could not get one as my motherboard had the wrong slots.
In order to upgrade just my video card, I need an entirely new computer.
AGP is on the way out, if you’re looking for a performance video card, get PCI-E. And make sure your power supply supports the extra power connector that a powerful PCI-E card needs, it’s a 6-pin connector IIRC. Yes, they need more power than the PCI-E slot can provide.
AGP is dying/dead. I had to buy a replacement AGP card for a customer a couple of months ago and it cost a fortune. The only AGP cards I could find in stock were top-end gaming ones, demand has dropped right off so it seems all you can get from brick and mortar shops are cards for people who are gaming with AGP motherboards.
Also note that many graphics cards today are using multiple chips and much more powerful chips than before, increasing the load on the PSU. For every additional chip on the card, I would recommend adding 100-150watts to the PSU estimate.
So, if you are running 2 4870X2 in crossfire mode, I would recommend having ~500-600 watts just for the cards. Also, if you are running this kind of setup, you also need to pay attention to “rails.”
