Skirmash

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
13
0
18,510
Hello everyone one,

I am thinking of buying the ABit IT7. It has everything I need including 4 channel RAID.

However, it does not support AGP 8X, and I don't know how concerned to be about this considering that the next generation of cards I believe support AGP 8X.

The question I have is this (and I know that it's all going to be largely based on theory) : How much of a performance hit will there be by running the next generation of cards at only AGP 4X. I assume this can be likened to a similar debate that was probably had then AGP 4X superceded AGP 2X.

There is no point in me buying a motherboard that is totally going to bottle neck the graphics performance of the next generation of cards. Anyone help me here ?

many thanks,

Ashley
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
Cards as recent as the Geforce 2 Ultra showed minimal gains going from 2x to 4x. The most recent cards use a bit more bandwidth, but nothing reaches the capacity limit of AGP4x. My very well educated guess is that it will be around 2 years before AGP8x makes a significant impact on performance. But by then the new AGP spec will be out, which is not reverse compatable with current spec, so by the time you actually NEED AGP8x it will be outdated.

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phsstpok

Splendid
Dec 31, 2007
5,600
1
25,780
Game designers avoid relying on the AGP port because bandwidth is too low. Models with low numbers of polygons are used to keep the amount of raw data passing from system memory to video card low. Textures are limited to fit in local video card memory for the same reason. Texture compression helps here. All of this is done because AGP bandwidth is just too limiting. AGP 4X bandwidth is only 1066 MB/sec. AGP 8X will be 2133 MB/sec. This is still puny compared to the 10+ GB/sec of memory bandwidth of current video cards and a far cry from that of the next generation cards. The less that AGP is used the better overall performance, as things stand now. AGP 8X will improve this but won't eliminate the bottleneck. Model complexity can double when AGP bandwidth doubles but then you're right back where we are now.

At some point a wider, much higher performance, graphics bus is going to be needed.

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