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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."
Granted, this is slightly off topic but worthy.
If multiple AGP is availiable for 8x then it's probably the greatest improvement possible. I ran 2 monitors at work, then got hooked. Now it's almost impossible for me to use 1 monitor. The problem is that you can't get multiple agps as of now so you have to use a crappy pci card.
This will also be awesome for gaming! I can't wait until I can get a dual agp card. I bet if they start making dual agp mobos then dual monitors will become very common.
The End.
Ok, first off AGP is an Accelerated Graphics Port. Notice that it is a PORT not a Bus. This means that in order to have more then one AGP Port, you would have to have more then one PCI bus. Since all the implementations of AGP share with the PCI control functions. It would be very difficult to just simply add more then one AGP port to the PC system, little things like the operating system would need to be updated, it's not like a simple bios tweak can handle it. There are already many problems with the current agp system. I'm sure some ofyou remember the whole fiasco with AMD and the AGP GART system tweak that was causing Linux to crash, but not Windows because AMD told MS to shut it off.
Anyway, I too would like multiple AGPs on my motherboard, but it would take more then a smart vendor to make it a reality. Intel designed the AGP as a stopgap, temporary solution for the lowest common denominator. And it still works well if you only need one monitor.
I'm currently using a six-monitor configuration for music production. I have Sonar spread over four 19" monitors and I use two 17" monitors to display virtual intruments/effects and the MOTU console.
3D isn't a factor on this machine, but it's tricky to get three (one AGP, two PCI) dual-head displays to work side by side correctly.
Two AGP slots would permit me to use just two Parhelia (or competitors'--once they jump on the triple-head bandwagon) cards and free up PCI slots for more useful things like DSP cards.
Then, too, a configuration like that would make for a breathtaking multi-monitor gaming experience!
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