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| | (Post a comment) » ATI RADEON X850 XT PE AGP Performance PreviewWhile PCI Express offers double the theoretical bandwidth of AGP, in practice today's applications just aren't designed to take advantage of the new interface. With this in mind, ATI has announced their first AGP products in over six months, including the X850 XT Platinum Edition AGP. The card boasts all the key features of the PCI-E card, only it supports the proven AGP interface. Read all the details on this new card in today's article! |  Previous news article | Back to main news | Next news article  |
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#8
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Author:
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Trogdor at 08:47pm 04/12/2005
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Response to #7:
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The problem is that a comparison between an AGP and a PCIe setup is
never apples-to-apples. For Intel setups, the the 915/925X adds a
lot of new stuff relative to 865PE/875P. On the AMD side, there's a
similar difference between nF3 Ultra and nF4 Ultra.
Overall, the total difference in performance between AGP and PCIe is
small. However, the benefits of PCIe (more power over the
connector, simplified communications standards, the ability to run
more than one high-speed interface, point to point vs. shared bus
topology) make it the better long-term choice.
If you already have an AGP system, there's no real point in
"upgrading" straight across to PCIe. You won't really
gain any performance. If you have an aging AGP system, however, I
wouldn't spend too much money on incremental upgrades before
switching to PCIe.
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#7
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Author:
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Anonymous at 01:52pm 04/12/2005
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Comment:
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Wouldn't it be nice to see the x850 xt agp vs its pci-express
brother? For 500+$ investment it may be an important comparison,
expecially in an article devoted to the additoin of the x850 agp to
the ati lineup. All the hype of pci-express and the fastest ati card
and we can't even have a direct comparison to look at. Again firing
squad is compairing apples to oranges.
The last time i commented on a review here was the nforce sli intel
review that didn't compare any other intel chipsets, just different
graphix cards. come on firing squad ......
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#6
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Author:
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EyeMaster (View my Profile) at 09:51am 04/12/2005
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Response to #3:
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You're actually almost wrong. A 256MB card and a 64MB card, if they
can play at same resolution with same game, that means the game is
using less than 64MB on both the cards.
If the 64MB card needs to load from normal ram, performance will
drop so low, you won't want to play it. So you decide to lower
texture details, or screen size, or something, and then the game is
playable again.
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#5
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Author:
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Anonymous at 11:51pm 04/11/2005
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Comment:
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PCIe is the future, and chip makers are preparing for that future
now. The benefits are:
- People with PCIe cards now will be able to migrate them to new
systems next year and the year after.
- PCIe is much more scalable. 32x is already in the works. 32x also
provides 2x the power of 16x.
- PCIe supplies more power through the slot. With GPUs being VERY
power hungry this days this reduces the need, or the number, of
molex connectors needed to power the card.
- PCIe is bidirectional and provides equal bandwidth each way. In
the future this will be important because it will allow more advance
virtual memory on GPUs. You will be able to store not only textures
and geometry meshes in system memory, but also shaders and other
outputs. And instead of storing all the levels of a mip map (e.g.
64x64, 256x256, and 2048x2048) you can only load those being used
(usually the ones farthest away which are the smallest) which will
effectively give the GPU more local memory. This means better
looking games because there will be more logical storage of
information.
- PCIe is not a Graphics only standard--it will eventually replace
ALL of the PCI slots. This means more bandwidth for all types of
additional addin and specialty cards. This means better sound cards,
faster HDD controllers, and so forth.
There are a lot of benefits of PCIe... we may not be seeing them all
now, but if you buy a $500 GPU now on AGP you may regret that in 2
years when PCIe is totally dominating the market and you want to
have a secondary computer and the $500 AGP card wont go in.
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#4
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Author:
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silverwolf at 01:14pm 04/11/2005
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Comment:
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8x AGP has never been used to it's fullest, so why should i care
about PCI-E?
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#3
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Author:
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jebo_4jc at 07:57am 04/11/2005
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Response to #2:
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I am certainly no expert, but the video card is constantly
communicating data. IIRC, a whole level's worth of textures, etc
isn't always loaded into video RAM at loading. Instead, a lot of
that data is held in system RAM. That's why 64MB cards can show the
same textures as 256MB cards, though much more slowly, since it
takes a "long" time to pull the texture info from the
RAM/CPU (and much longer, if the texture isn't in RAM, but is on the
hard drive).
AGP has limited bandwidth and can only transfer data one way:
system-->video card. PCI-E is 12x faster or something and also
supports bi-directional communication from the video
card-->system.
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#2
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Author:
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EyeMaster (View my Profile) at 07:39am 04/11/2005
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Comment:
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I fail to see what the AGP or PCI Express has to offer. The data is
only transfered on loading, not while playing, otherwise we wouldn't
need the ram on the video cards...
What am I not understanding right?
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#1
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Author:
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kahlua at 02:57am 04/11/2005
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Comment:
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$500 US is too much for this poor Canadian no matter how fast the
card is .
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