How much performance is lost between AGP 4x from AGP 8x?

[tylerthedruid]

I currently have a VERY VERY VERY ghetto compaq and have been trying to simply play Black and White 2. I also hope to make BF2 playable - it is choppy on lowest settings; about every 30 seconds the controls freeze in one direction for about 5 seconds, making for one hell of a helicopter ride.

My goal is to get a new graphics card to help hold me over until I'm ready to invest in a new computer. Hopefully I can survive another year with this unwanted bastard child of a 1.6ghz pc2100 400mhzFSB machine. I keep building computers for friends and feel like crying sometimes. Sometimes at night, I think of ending it all and i cut myse- errr, nevermind.

Anyways, I'm looking at the GFX card lists and have my eyes on some 4x/8x cards. I've had my eye on the SAPPHIRE 100131 Radeon X800GTO 256MB GDDR3 AGP 4X/8X Video Card - OEM .

How much power will I lose running this thing at 4x?

BTW, I'm currently using a Geforce FX5500 256mb.

 

[tylerthedruid]

Is this question really so stupid nobody wants to answer?

 

[lakedude]

Well obviously 8x is potentially twice as fast as 4x but the real question is if 4x is a bottleneck for the card in question. I'm sure someone that is really good at math could get into fill rates and bus bandwidth and give you an answer. Perhaps if I get really bored tonight I'll try to figure it out. I don't think it is an easy question to answer. If the card does not stress the 4x interface than 8x is not going to be any faster.

 

[cleeve]

90% of the time you wouldn't notice a difference with ther naked eye.

In some very high-stress situations, like high resolution and high levels of AA, there might be up to a 10% difference. But it's not huge by any stretch of the imagination.

Basically, if you have a 4x AGP motherboard you want to keep with a decent processor, it's fine to buy an 8x AGP card.

 

[lakedude]

Well I tried to figure it all out and have had no luck from a math standpoint. AGP 4x bandwidth is 1056 MB/sec but I've not found any info on how much bandwidth is required by any givin card. It is a good question I'll continue to look into.

 

[tylerthedruid]

Yeah I've been searching a while. That dang oil-filled PC distracted me for a while though. Laughing about the conspiracy theories; It's nothing but a marketing gimmick from Crisco!

As far as processors go, can my crappy 1.6ghz P4 work with this GFX card? Will I still feel a decent performance boost?

 

[linux_0]

I agree 4x and 8x really does not really make a big difference.

The 6600GT AGP is a decent card with good price/performance.

Obviously if you can afford it upgrade to an AMD64 socket 939 + nForce4 PCI-Express and a PCI-Express VGA card 6600GT / 6800GT / 7800GT PCI-Express.

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/WishDetail.asp?ID=1841212

something like this perhaps for about $400