AGP is useless?

[CosmoKramer]

I have an argument with an individual with very *firm* opinions. He claims AGP is useless and that we just as well use could have used the PCI-bus even today.

I OTOH claim that the ever increasing geometry load necessitates a dedicated high-speed port.

Who is right and why?

I know this is an old argument but I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as you guys so my mere opinion doesn't carry much weight in the argument.

 

[Tagrineth]

Dude, even the 3Dfx Voodoo3 / 4 / 5 cards benefitted slightly from AGP and they ran PCI-66 in the AGP slot. :lol Well actually some V4's (L-shaped boards, yes they can be found) are tested and AGP4x-approved, but I digress...

If you want to see just how much AGP does impact performance, take a look at comparisons between nVidia and ATi's AGP and PCI models.

ESPECIALLY nVidia's. nVidia PCI cards since Riva128!! have had a very unfriendly per cent lower performance compared to AGP cards.

There's even a second jump going from AGP 1x to 2x, though 2x -> 4x isn't much of a change.

The benchmarks exist; hell, if you have an AGP card, get PowerStrip, force AGP 1x, and do a few benchmarks comparing it to AGP 2x/4x.

The difference is there. And it ain't small neither. ^_^

 

[CosmoKramer]

First of all - thank you.

"If you want to see just how much AGP does impact performance, take a look at comparisons between nVidia and ATi's AGP and PCI models."

This is what I would like to see.

 

[Kristof]

You can see a difference on high polygon throughput cases, just try benmark (you know the spiral thingy benchmark) with and without AGP enabled on a GF card and you should see a difference in performance... or so NVIDIA claims since it's their way of testing if the end users has AGP properly configured.