The growing application of 3D games places a lot of strain on
the system capacity. With the improving display quality the usage of polygons
and texture data has increased enormously.
This is where the bottleneck appears: increasing the volume of
3D data not only demands a processor that continuously calculates it, but
also the system-bus for transferring the data to the graphic card. While
the PCI bus has been able to sustain this kinds of load until now, it might
not be able to do so in the near future.
With improving presentation quality, the 3D-accelerator card requires
more and more local storage to avoid the time taken for slow reloads from
main memory. If it were possible to transfer some main memory RAM to the
3D-accelerator card (or use it for the video application), things would
be much easier.
The Advance Graphic Port seems to fulfill these requirements.
The special card-slot is based on the PCI-Bus, but it uses additional signals
and more compact optical fiber connector.
AGP works with a 66 MHz frequency and two operating modes: x1 and x2 with 266Mbps throughput for devices with normal speed and 533Mbps for devices with double speed.
What one really wants to find out is whether AGP gets any remarkable speed advantages. Since few application that use AGP natively have appeared to date, AGP natively have appeared to date, what one really wants to know is whether the standard application of today can use it with advantage.
Since most applications today do not make the right use of AGP, the mark only offers a total lead of 1 percent for AGP for the Pentium III system. In the entertainment are only 6 percent improvement can be measured. In case of the socket & mother board, the total advantage of AGP still remains at 5 percent. However, the entertainment area makes a distinct improvement of 25 percent.
The result speaks for themselves as of now, a convincing argument
for switching over to AGP cannot be found. Strangely, AGP enable
software appears in large quantities. As of today, anyone who wants to
procure a new main board, inclusive of a graphic card is best advised to
go in for one with an AGP solutions even if it is slightly more expensive.
Go To Page: 1
