VGA Charts IV: AGP Graphics Cards

The Test Candidates

The test bed consists of 35 participants this time. Here, we took some of the older cards that were included in the previous VGA Charts. All candidates support DirectX 9, with the exception of the two GeForce 4 Ti models, which we include here because they are highly popular and widespread. Because they can only carry out DirectX 8 shader code, their benchmarks appear in gray in the tables.

New to the group are ATI's Radeon X800 XT PE and X800 Pro, as well as NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra, 6800 GT and 6800. The ATI Radeon X700 and NVIDIA GeForce 6600, which were recently launched, are only available in PCI Express versions and will be included in the upcoming VGA Charts add-on that centers on PCI Express cards.

Various in-between models, such as the Radeon 9550 and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 and 5700 LE, are geared for OEMs and are not included here. Each card maker equips these models with the most disparate clock rates, memory bus width and modules. If you are interested in these cards, you should definitely take a careful look at the cards' specs before making a purchase, so that you don't end up with a cheap version that only has a slow 64-bit memory interface and very low clockrates.