The Impact of the AGP-Speed

AGP-Speed Benchmark Results - SPECviewperf 6.1.1, Continued

Lightscape is again rather unimpressed by AGP4x, but at least on i840 you can notice quite a difference between AGP1x and AGP2x.

Last but not least the well known ProCDRS-benchmark for ProEngineer shows even quite an advance if AGP4x is used. AGP4x seems to be worth a consideration for ProEngineer users.

Summary Of AGP-Speed Results

The benchmarks have shown that even now AGP-speed doesn't seem to have a whole lot of an impact on the current crop of 3D-games. For gamers AMD might get away with its claim that AGP1x is just as good as AGP2x as long as the difference is only 4%. This will only remain until finally 3D-games with detailed objects and thus high polygon counts become available, as NVIDIA has been promising us for quite a while. Those games will certainly make a difference between the different AGP-speeds. The first two benchmarks should give you a pretty good idea of it.

Professional users of OpenGL-software should avoid the Athlon/Irongate-combination if they are planning to use a 3D-card with NVIDIA's GeForce256-chip, as e.g the Quadro-cards. At the moment it's close to impossible to run any GeForce or Quadro card on Irongate under NT at anything more than PCI66-speed. Athlon/KX133 or Pentium III on an expensive RDRAM-platform are the smarter choices.