using agp 4x with a agp 8x card

[epicstruggle]

Hi,

Im planning on building a new computer system soon, and the mobo will only have an agp 4x slot. My question is what kinda performance hit will I be taking by using this mobo with an agp 8x capable card (ati's 9700). Will ati's card be using all available bandwith.

thanks for any and all information
kirit

 

[Gollum]

I'd expect the performance penalty to be rather small actually. AGP 8x will be important for some future games that have truly a massive amount of data that constantly keeps getting sent to the GPU. I wouldn't expect any such games to become available within the next 18 months though, right now even going back from AGP 4x to APG 1x often only causes a very small performance penalty (like <5%). Until games don't get MUCH more complex than they are today graphically, AGP 8x won't be vital to our gaming experience IMHO...