Tackling AGP 8X

EconolineCrush writes "AGP 8X is popping up in new chipsets and motherboards, and graphics cards are also starting to support the standard, but is there a major performance advantage over the older AGP 4X spec? According to this review of NVIDIA's latest AGP 8X-enable graphics products, no. The review also covers some of AGP 8X's new functionality, which includes support for multiple AGP ports with multiple AGP devices per port. Whether future games and applications take advantage of AGP 8X's extra bandwidth remains to be seen, but more interesting should be what companies do with multiple AGP devices and ports."

Comments

AGP8

[Nonillion]

That would be cool to have more than one AGP slot. I am sometimes disapointed that I cannot have two dual headed agp cards installed...

Re:Hmm

[OverCode@work]

AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port, a very hackish specialization of the PCI bus for graphics devices. It is a master-to-target link, not a bus, per se. Its signalling rates are not be appropriate for a general-purpose bus (mobo manufacturers have enough trouble getting it right on the short runs to a single AGP port), and its optimizations are slanted toward squeezing performance out of bus traffic typical of graphics devices, not random access disk controllers and network devices.

Not to say that you *couldn't* have an AGP disk controller. But I doubt the performance improvement would be sufficient to justify the hassle and the lost AGP slot.

PCI-X is starting to come close to the lower AGP speeds in performance, and is a much cleaner and more general standard.

-John

Re:Stop thinking graphics

[Junta]

Why the hell would you need that sort of bandwidth for a SSL accelerator? Even if you were using it for Hard Disk I/O, Hard Disk I/O goes throuh the PCI bus, so it would not be saturated. For the most reasonable area of network usage, bandwidth on any PC equipment wouldn't go anywhere near such a need. For bigger needs, you probably need bigger equipment anyway. Don't think a dedicated Java processor would be a big seller, especially with the speedups in implementations seen as of late. AI hardware may sound intriguing, but it is so unsexy in terms of consumer visiblity. That, and methods to AI frequently change.

No, the place where the bandwidth has the most impact on the user experience remains the graphics. They look pretty nice nowadays, but until you see scenes generated on the fly at 60 fps or more that are indistinguishable from real life, graphics will always be lacking.