AGP vs. PCI-E

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sheky

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Ok well you already know my question. What's the difference? And which in the end is better?
 
PCI-E is the latest. 16x bandwidth that of regular PCI, as opposed to the max AGP of 8x.

The two are not interchangeable; your motherboard has support for one of the two.
 
-PCI-E has doubble the slot bandwidth
-PCI-E provides more power input compared to AGI or PCI
-PCI-E ranges from speeds from 1x to 16x
-PCI-E supports SLI / CROSSFIRE
-PCI-E is cheaper (You may see PCI-E versions of graphics cards can be more expensive, but that is due to the AGP to PCI-E bridge needed on cards that used to be AGP)
-PCI-E is futureproof and supports newer cards

Right now, on an equal system, you could not notice the difference between PCI-E and AGP however, and their is little to none peformance difference.
 
do graphics cards need the extra bandwidth of PCI-E? at the moment no GPU could cope with what AGP8x can potentially throw at it so i assume the other advantages of PCI-E are the main reasons for the change, what is SLI?

from DJ-CHRIS' post i can see the increase in power being of advantage, i know some graphics cards are very power hungry that they eat all of the power and your first PCI device cannot get enough.

Right now though i cant see the real advantage of PCI-E so how long are we looking at until it becomes standard?
 
It's becoming standard right now

Anyways, with a 7800 GTX you actually may be able to see a difference in AGP 8x vs 4x, but this would be hard to test right now :/
 
Heyyo,

Now curious, make sure you don't get confused. Preformance wise it goes like this for vidcards:

PCI-Express > AGP > PCI

And btw Chris you forgot to mention:

PCIE supports ATI Crossfire :D

Btw, ATI Crossfire > SLI.

Main advantage cause it works good in any game, even ones that don't support dual vidcard modes natively. This is where SLI fails. If a game doesn't support SLI, it has virtually no framerate gain over a single vidcard, if anything a loss.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050524/vga_charts-09.html

note, COR doesn't support SLI rendering modes, thus the framerates.. yeah, so I find SLI a waste of cash until nvidia does something about this. I mean, they bought out 3DFX, and they had solutions for this that they used in their voodoo2 lineup which (for now) was the most effective dual vidcard setup. ATI did some good solutions for games that don't support dual-vidcards with Crossfire.. I don't see why nvidia dropped those solutions.. but now they're paying badly for it.

Btw, good readup on ATI's Crossfire:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050602/index.html

The dual rendering mode of SuperAA sounds freakin' sweet. So like better visuals inna dual vidcard solution with minimal framerate loss (if any). So it won't be doing like 150F/S.. who cares? 14xAA with a steady framerate? that would be an incredible sight...
 
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