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would agp's bandwidth be a limitation?

Tags:
  • Graphics Cards
  • Bandwidth
  • Bottleneck
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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August 27, 2001 2:19:55 AM

think about it.. your agp is 64bits long running at 266mhz (or 4x) that gives you an effective bandwidth of 2128MB/s (convert the bits to bytes which would be 8 times the mhz). right? Take a geforce 3 which at least does double that! How is it that the agp wouldn't be a bottleneck? I mean ya back sometime there was very little difference but also figure that the cards back then weren't even close to the agp's maximum throughput too. It's like taking a really huge pipe and then bolting a really small one after it and expect the performance to be good.

unless i'm wrong about how many bits the agp slot is wouldn't the agp slot be the current limitation.. or i should say the next bottleneck?

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More about : agp bandwidth limitation

August 27, 2001 3:24:33 AM

AGP <b>is a bottleneck</b> even with some older video cards. To get around it most modern games have most of heavy work done on the video card's local memory. Because of this, in the future more video memory will become more important.

You may have noticed that you get minimal gains going from AGP 2X to AGP 4X. This is because programs use AGP transfers as little as possible to avoid the bottleneck.

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August 27, 2001 3:55:04 AM

I think this was established before the AGP bus even hit the market. At the time, there were those who said it was a useless feature for anything but budget systems. It's also the reason you see video cards with 64MB of RAM.
a b U Graphics card
August 27, 2001 4:50:09 AM

Crashman says it will be quite a while before AGP cards use up the bandwidth already provided do to the backwards compatablility of games.

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