• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

IS AGP DEAD?

In a funny sort of way, IMO AGP is less dead than it was 18 months ago. At that time, it was pretty much abandoned with very little to challenge the oldschool 6800u/x850xt-pe cards, aside from the limited edition 7800GS+ series.

However, over the last year we have seen ATI bring out the x1950pro and Nvidia have also been offering a bit more in the midrange in terms of bringing the 7600GT to AGP.

Essentially I think that NV/ATI somewhat underestimated the sustained demand for AGP cards. With plenty of people out there running ~3ghz S478/S754 systems not wanting to ditch their old kit the high end demand was still there, plus of course the midrange upgrades from all the shop bought PCs. This forced them to respond by porting PCI-E parts to AGP, which was definitely worth their while IMO due to the price premium which AGP cards can command.

The cynic in me does wonder if the move to PCI-E was almost a case of the big hardware companies scratching each other's backs. The abscence of high-end AGP gfx cards encouraged people to move over to S939/S775 platforms somewhat quicker than they might have liked, which of course also meant new CPUs and in some cases new RAM too. Likewise people wanting a new A64 or C2D setup were pushed down the road of getting a new gfx card. All this at a time when AGP 8x was plenty fast enough.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
don't see any dates mentioned in that link u posted ??

ahh agp pro, now thats something thats still ticking along nicely.
Click to expand...
Useful website Ive forgotten about - http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

Dates of White Papers:

AGP v1.0 - July 31 1996
AGP v2.0 - May 4, 1998
AGP v3.0 - September 2002

PCI-E v1.0 - July 2002 - See 2nd to last paragraph on p11 - verifying that as unsure if thats public release dates...
PCI-E v2.0 - 15 January 2007
PCE-E v3.0 - 2009?!? - See Wiki

Hopefully Ive made my point ;)

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
Last edited:
something is not right with those dates, agp3 was out after pcie1?? that doesn't sound right at all. pcie1 doesn;t seem to be as old as 2002.

the only point you make is using dodgey dates with no vaildity to them. even i could slap out some dates like those but lets not get into that sort of thing shall we. ;)
 
Cyber-Mav said:
something is not right with those dates, agp3 was out after pcie1?? that doesn't sound right at all. pcie1 doesn;t seem to be as old as 2002.

the only point you make is using dodgey dates with no vaildity to them. even i could slap out some dates like those but lets not get into that sort of thing shall we. ;)
Click to expand...
Erm - click the links - they are Intel branded White Papers - unfortunately PCI-SIG keep everything under look and key :rolleyes:...

Please dont make a fool of yourself...

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
your talking about spec release dates, im on about dates of first implementation, as in when did the first boards come out using pcie v1.

i see life span as in date v1 came out on hardware till v2 appears on hardware.

lifespan is not when they announce something on paper.

so far pci has probably longest life span since its still on motherboards today, followed by agp3 since asrock make the mobos that have agp slot on it.

pci-e1 lifespan will be seen as in when it first appeared on a mobo till when pcie2 mobos hit the market.

white papers and good for nothing but wiping my @$$ with
 
ps3ud0 said:
snip
Click to expand...

AGP was hailed as dead two years ago when cards started appearing en mass on PCIe...

The 79xx series of cards from Nvidia were supposedly NOT meant to migrate to AGP, but...

All this because the AGP interface was obviously too slow (afterall, why would PCIe x16 be used if it wasn't that much better) to cope. The irony being that it's still plenty fast enough for most cards out there at the moment.

Will it stay that way? I suppose the only way to get any real idea is to somehow force an 8800GTX to run on a slower socket or somehow track its resource allocation on the PCIe bus to determine whether or not it would actually exceed AGP8x bandwidth...

A technology will only die when it's not worth a manufacturer's while to produce hardware using it.OcUK is an ivory tower of bleeding-edge hardware, so it may come as a surprise to some to hear that not everybody watercools, has a 24" LCD monitor, a C2D running way beyond its specified limits and a four-drive RAID0 array just for Windows...

Take a look at the average Steam user's hardware for an even more surprising revelation... not long ago, most users were still on 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with 800x600 not far behind that.
 
I'd have just gone with celliotts initial response really, if you are buying all-new then there is no point in (or even chance of) going with AGP but if upgrading a decent old system it can still be worthwhile if you don't want the hassle of a motherboard change. It isn't quite dead as a standard but it is almost definitely in the twilight of its years.
 
its very simple, a bunch of 965, or i think it was 965 maybe p35, boards would under a few circumstances default to pci-e 1x and low and behold boom, you're fps drops like a bullet, theres a cut off somewhere sure and right now the full 16x isn't really utilised but thats life.

pointless argument/thread again.

agp is old, so why support it. as said quicker newer things are better in the long run, they are used less effectively when people cling on to the old tech and cards aren't pushed forwards as fast. so far since pci-e nvidia and ati have massively decreased the increase in speed from one gen to the next, well 7800/7900/8800 are pretty much joke leaps, as were x1800/x1900 2900xt's. we used to see, in very simple terms a doubling in basically all power in the cards from first gen up till 6800/x800 series with generally a speed bump card inbetween sporting the same basic model number x800/x850 and so on. i'm not saying its fully down to agp or anything, its just another excuse.

people hate change and cling on for dear life saying "its working fine, i won't upgrade", not just gfx. xp/vista, its not a massive change, but people talk such crap about it. its unstable/supports nothing/has no drivers. that was true for some things in the release candidate, since then the complaints i see are non specific all the time. "i tried vista, nothing worked, won't ever touch it again". 2 mins after installing vista you can have it working about 99% the same as XP but in general prettier. theres no huge reason TO get it, but if you're a gamer, and complaining constantly about dx10 theres no reason not to get it either. its cheap, its gonna work fine with no problems for 99.999% of people and hardware, but people still won't do it because they hate change.

AGP is dead, as you pointed out, if you're at the point where you are building a new system getting an agp one is plain retarded. but thats been the case since ath 64 first came out.

thats probably the very best way to decide if somethings not worth it anymore/obsolete. if you are about to buy a whole system what should you really have on it. its been pci-e for at least 3 years? I've just done 3 years at uni and right before then up till i started we were selling ath 64 939 stuff, which in general i think means ath 64 754 systems were available from around the august/september mark the year before that so 2003. since that date buying a agp based new system was a bad idea. so we've had 4 years of pci-e, we didn't have 4 years of agp 8x. i think maybe the first 8x cards were the 9700 series, possibly the gf3's but i'm not so sure. also some agp cards didnt'work on agp 4x slots and a lot wouldn't work on older than that agp slots.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
i doubt everyone will be on pcie, majority of pc users are on integrated graphics, its mainly the enthusiasts which use pcie cards.

as for pcie there was a thread on here saying pcie2 cards won;t work on pcie1 slots, so that kills pcie1 lifespan greatly if its true.

and 8x agp cards seems to work fine on 4x agp ports so going by that agp is not dead and won;t be for a while yet.

who knows, maybe my asrock board now will be going back to agp in the future for a more powerful card.... doubt it though unless something more powerful than a 8800gtx is out for agp, which i doubt will happen.....
:)
Click to expand...


PCI-E 2 and PCI-E are backwards compatible. I find your arguements to be extremely biast in what "facts" you use. You should be a MP lol.

the shadow said:
AGP IS DEAD LONG LIVE AGP:D
Click to expand...


*scratches head trying to work out the point of this post*
 
8igdave said:
*scratches head trying to work out the point of this post*
Click to expand...
Cyber-Mav said:
was that a typo? was it ment to read: "AGP IS DEAD LONG LIVE PCI-E" :confused:
Click to expand...

Are neither of you familiar with the phrase "the king is dead, long live the king"? la.

drunkenmaster, not totally 100% on your timeline since socket 939 supported AGP for a while before PCI-E motherboards were released or at least were mainstream enough to be worthy of support. But in essence you are indeed right, there has been plenty of time for people to make the change, it isn't as if it was suddenly sprung on anyone. :)
 
Not Dead in my House & still getting on BF2 maps First.
I am old & so is my system & i have to say the more i get out of it the better i feel. I have seen Thousands of pounds spent over the years & still they don't beat me onto a Map :D
Nowt wrong with AGP for those on a Budget or just getting the most from there Current old system like me.
 
AGP isn't dead. Not everyone has the money to upgrade basically the whole PC, especially if its not yet needed. If you knew someone with a socket 939 (AGP) board, an x2 dual core CPU and 2gig of RAM (like mine) how could you say buying an x1950pro (AGP) is not a good upgrade? Yes PCI-E is better (mainly because of choice and price) but that doesn't mean everything below is not worth bothering with. You wouldn's say a 500g HD is pointless because a 750g exists or that an e6320 is pointlesss because an e6750 exists. Again, it comes down to money. To quote the above system again:

x2 3800+ @ 2.6ghz
2 gig ddr(1) 400
x1950pro 512mb AGP

Now you add up how much that would cost to upgrade to an 8800gts ? Replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory and then the 8800 all at the same time. Then building it, then re-installing windows all to upgrade a system that still plays games fine. I will upgrade at some point in the next 12months but at the moment it wouldn't be cost effective. Yes i could get a pci-e s939 board but that still means building it and installing windows for a motherboard that is likely to be used for a matter of months before the whole lot comes out again. a lot of work! And also good s939 pci-e boards are quite expensive.

Although i do agree to build a PC with an AGP motherborad would be silly.
 
Last edited:
the only people who shoudl be buying agp cards are those who are using P4 socket 478 and K7 socket 462 (socket A)

for someone who has a socket 939 cpu buying an agp is not the wise thing to do since all that person would need is a new mobo costing 40 quid and use thier cpu ram etc and have any choice of pci-e card they want.

just my opinion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom