AGP 4x vs. 8x (?)

[alecjahn]

My friend is complaining of bad benchmark scores and game performance - i get much better scores than he and he has a much better card than me. His motherboard is kinda old, and it only has AGP 4x on it. What are the performance differances between 4x and 8x? is it really double-anything ( 8 is twice as much as 4)
Should he upgrade his motherboard to an 8x in the near future, or what?

Anything "ya'll" can say will probably help.
Thanks.

 

[Deranged_Monkey]

well considering 4x is not around on any modern mobo (i think) he will upgrade it, as for hte difference, on paper it sounds as if it is better but i really dont know

 

[Jorsoft]

8x is twice as fast as the 4x setting. The numbers have to deal with the speed of the data transfer between the video card and...something else (does it really matter?). The 1x AGP setting (the original/base speed) is 66 mhz. Therefore, the 2x AGP setting is twice that (133 mhz), and so on. It works similar to the speed of CD-Rom drives, i.e. 24x is twice as fast as 12x, etc.
So 8x is twice as fast as your friend's 4x, I'm not totally convinced that it's just his card holding him back, especially since upgrading to a new mobo isn't that easy and usually requires a complete reinstall of windows. What are his system specs compared to yours? Maybe a new CPU or something would do just as well.

 

[DyNaStY336]

From 4X to 8X you will not see a big difference. You can look that up on the internet, not a big performance jump at all, in fact some people lower they're 8X agp card to the 4X setting for one reason or another. Most games just dont need the 8X speed as of right now.

 

[AndrewtheGreat]

AGP 8x is way faster

 

[DyNaStY336]

"Current games aren't ablep to saturate the AGP 4x bus, which can pump about 1.06GB/sec of info from the videocard to main memory. Our testing backs this up. We tested the Radeon 9800 Pro in a board that allowed us to disable AGP 8x. And, as far as our benchmarks go, there was no significant difference between 8x mode and 4x mode. We do not expect to see games this year that stress the 4x AGP bus."

^^ was taken out of Maximum PC presents 355 PC Answers: The Ultimate Reference Guide For Your PC and All Of Its Components, So you see Yes, AGP 8x is faster but does that really matter as of right now? no because games dont even push that to the limit as of right now

 

[alecjahn]

Thanks everyone for all the responces. I'm pretty sure it could be some other part of his computer that is giving him cruddy scores. I'm gonna let him borrow some of my equipment to see if his scores go up at all. (new memory, more memory, CPU, etc)

Thats kinda funny, considering we just got PCI Express out, and it's supposebly REALLY fast. Why would we need to get more speed potential, when we dont even use the potential we have now? I guess I'll just have to think in the future.

 

[BlazingWolf]

You present a VERY good point about PCI Express, but it's the technology of tommorow, that hasn't be harnessed yet today.

 

[alecjahn]

Yeah i was thinking that too. They have to put out new technologies to get ready for other technologies - back when PCI came out, im sure they didnt make full use of the technology back then, and this is probably the same way. It's interesting to see that history sorta reoccours when new technologies slowly phase out old ones, and it happens the same way with each new "thing". (see: 5 1/4 floppies : 3.5 in floppies :: 3.5in floppies : USB Flash Devices)