AGP is back from the dead. Again.
I couldn't find a board in the office with one of these so I actually had to search through the tubes! Yeesh!
AMD is planning to release AGP versions of its Radeon HD2600 and HD2400 GPUs but has reportedly encountered driver instability issues with DirectX 10 and HDMI. It was noted that these problems should be alleviated by the end of the month, however in typical release-date-speculation-fashion, we won't hold our breath.
Nvidia is currently having to redesign its bridge chip for the G8x series, with the A05 silicon said to be currently working with the GeForce 8600 and 8400 GPUs as well as upcoming G92 and G98 products that will arrive later in the year.
In case you are too young to remember all those years ago, the AGP interface is limited to about 50W of power draw, and you can forget any sort of multi-GPU SLI or CrossFire.
But why AGP still? We're literally days away from PCI-Express 2.0, with 1.0 having been around for three years already. It seems emerging markets are still heavily dependent on the interface, as are many Internet Cafes, which as small businesses can find the cost of upgrading quite significant.
Are you still an AGP user? You know, one of those people that has to wind a cog to get their machine running. If so, throw a few more logs in the boiler and let us know if you're happy for the extended upgrade path in the forums!
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Discuss in the forums ReplyI see you have a LanParty 925X :o twas a nice board!
AGP forever .o/
With a full 8x bus and an 8800GTS 320 you could probably play Crysis on medium at least.
Stoneage fools
However, my last PC that I used for gaming was also AGP. Overclocked 7800GS. A real beaut of a card - the most powerful AGP card available in fact. But in order to upgrade the CPU, I had to upgrade the mobo. Which meant PCI-E. And DDR2. Not that I'm complaining of course.
AGP still has its place - there are some great cheap kit available that is fine for workstations/HTPCs/etc.
Sam
LOL
I know what you mean though, people expect to be able to get a all singing and dancing quad core supporting board and then whack their 4 year old AGP graphics card back into the system because it cost them 300 pounds when they bought it and want to squeeze every penny of usage out of it.
In my opinion, these recent AGP cards are good for those people that consider the GPU the most important part of the PC, and prefer to invest several times on a GPU rather than on a balanced updated system. But I admit that there may be some cases where it makes sense (thinking about expensive AGP based workstations).
In my case I did the exact opposite (which is considered a mistake by many ). I have a core 2 duo 6600 with an Asrock 776dual-VSTA, 1 Gb DDR-400 dual channel and a MSI geforce ti-4200-8x (with video in) . As I'm not a gamer and this board was very expensive at the time (I bought the retail box :() I decided to update the motherboard and CPU. However, the overal performance of my system on a daily basis isn't very good, so I'm going to update the motherboard and the GPU (finally :o).
I said this to point out that Core 2 duo+AGP = to Asrock dual-VSTA series (weak) motherboards.
(It's just my opinion):o
I guess I'm one of those..... But wouldn't it make more sense to invest on making good AGP motherboards for state of the art CPUs instead of making state of the art AGP cards for older systems, as far as the squeeze-every-penny users are concerned?
DX10 is actually a REASON to get more life out of AGP, since the API actually can offload a lot more to the graphics card in an efficient manner, whereas DX9 used to need to push things through the CPU. It would actually extend the life of those boards significantly!
It's the conflict between graphics manufacturers and chipset and CPU producers. One wants more market, the latter wants to drive new ones.
I've actually just returned my HD2400Pro today as it didn't get along with my SN95G5 at all! Great when it worked, but frequent blue screens the like of which I haven't seen since the 9700Pro days. Decided to dump the shuttle, not worth the hassle (I was intending to use it as an HTPC).
So seeing as the cards are not going to perform greatly compared to PCI-E interface, what do we get from this? Direct X 10, which on a system thats 4 years old, is it really going to even handle Vista so it can use the new technology?
Sso the only advantage really that I see is that the new cards would have support for HDCP with a HDMI port.
Does XP even support HDCP :?
Long Live the AGP!!!!!!!
Did you miss my post? :)
Most AGP 8x systems can support 2GB of RAM, so I'm failing to see why Vista would run THAT slowly on them. DX10 also offloads a lot of things onto the graphics card, but it doesn't require that much super bandwidth to do it.
To top it off, let's clear the air of a huge misconception. PCIe was not introduced because AGP was bottlenecked. The AGP 8x bus is STILL not overloaded with today's games, it wasn't even half-loaded when PCIe 1.0 came out. Bandwidth is not your limiting factor. It's like the move to SATA - it really hasn't done anything yet except minimise cable clutter.
The only weakness will be the bridge chip, which could lag things behind PCIe a *little*. That being said, the way DX10 API works could extend the life of older chipsets on Vista, providing reason to actually use it as an OS for games when on an older system.
And XP does not have native support for HDCP, no.
pentium lll with with radeon 9550 for almost 10 years now... new power supply and 8600gts with a pentium lll :D
Respect to you.
Will certainly be interesting to see how they compare to PCI-E versions, if the 4 year old systems are able to run vista, then can only hope that DX10 pulls it off.
I've got a dual Opteron K8T Master2Far with AGP slot. :D
AGP is FTW!
The 925X is a nice board; and a good OCer to boot (had the 3.2 clocked at 3.92; I could probably take it higher if I wanted to).
My new rig I'm building will be getting the Lanparty UT 680i board
Its still by far the most stable PC I've ever used.
Thats the exact set up I have!!!
It is by far the most stable computer ive ever built. I recently upgraded to an x1650 pro from a 9800 pro. I thought it was going to be the last AGP card id buy before having to go all out on a new pci-e system and all that, looks like I was wrong. Quite frankly I have neither the need nor the money for a multi gpu system.
That is spooky... I recently upgraded from a 9800 Pro to an X1650 Pro as well...
oh, for the love of all that is holy, the LAST thing we need is another Nexxo ;)
lol I Wonder what Degree hes got and if he can put a post together like Nexxo :)
It's good to be able to get old standards but you've got to question if it's really worth sticking a huge GPU powerhouse into something where everything else in the PC will hold it back wasting an investment. Also you can't upgrade the motherboard and keep your nice graphics card. So nVidia keep making those AGPs (and PCIs) but no more than GeForce7 it's a waste of time and money IMO.
still running agp but I don't think it's a very good interface and have had nothing but trouble from it through the years with fast writes/dma and other ascosiated nasties. Saying that I think it will be a good 5 or 6 YEARS till I can afford a new computer with starting uni in a years time and money been very tight from that point on. The gradual upgrade path got broken after soccet A unfortuntaly.
*with a x1950pro my pc is mostly held back by cpu speed and memory bandwidth so I wouldn't see any point in getting anything faster. (only some benchmarks are held back by gpu - actual games no).
don't worry agp 8x only helps with the very fastest cards for agp like 7800's and x1900's
I have four computers in my house that are AGP based, including my primary gaming machine. A 2.1GHz Athlon 64 with 1GB of DDR and a Radeon X1550. The motherboard is four years old, but it's still fast enough for me to run most anything I want. Bioschock is the first game I've encountered that wont run on this system.
I'm in the process of building my first PCI-e/DDR2 based system, not because my current one is too slow, but simply because I know that I'm at the point where it will cost more to upgrade the current system then to build a new one. AGP video cards are now more expensive then PCI-e.
I might bite but I am leaning to a whole new computer before just a new gfx card.
AGP DX10 for the win
PCI-E 16x isn't actually a lot faster then AGP 8x (like 10-20% i think) - however, as proven with SLI, cards work fine on PCI-E 8x
The move to PCI-E was meant to be a double whammie, get rid of AGP and PCI in one go, its also a lot easier to wire with PCI-E
However, we are still stuck with both, although i don't think you can get a motherboard with AGP these days
So your saying that the Geforce 9800 will be released this year?!
I think I have a celebrity stalker. This setup is perfect for me, or at least close enough. Once a component on this system goes kaputzky I will upgrade to pci-e. But until then I am riding the AGP train to the end!!!
It's a lot cheaper then upgrading everything but I have to admit it is a strange move IMO.
While I agree with Delphium that AGP probably isn't for the uber gamer (would a hard core gamer still be running an AGP setup anyway?), I'm definitely with tank_rider on the idea of upgrading an AGP system just to give it better 2D video capabilities.
I'm currently on a Northwood (130nm) 2.8 GHz Hyperthreaded P4, with an HDTV tuner, and a GeForce 5200 FX. I built this setup in early 2004, with 512 megs of ram. I upgraded recently to 2GB...but honestly, that much ram probably wasn't really necessary with XP. I don't game, and the 5200 seemed to me like the bare-minimum at the time for what I wanted to do (HDTV watching). This rig works nicely decoding the MPEG-2 encoded 720p and 1080i broadcast TV for me (in the U.S.), and I'm very happy with it.
However, since my P4 doesn't support the extra video-decoding commands that newer processors do, and since my video card doesn't do any hardware decoding of MPEG-4 signals, I'm going to need to upgrade *if* the stupid BluRay/HDDVD format war looks stable enough (and cheap enough) for me to invest in a format. My upgrade would really only require a low-end, but current-generation video card...and that's all I should need, provided it can do all the video decoding on its own. My machine is probably fine for me for another two years or more...adding 1080p MPEG-4 playback capabilities could go a long way to making this PC perfectly fine as my main rig for an extra several years.
Sure, it might be nice to have a cutting-edge machine...but really, while a new Quad-core Core 2 Duo would surely blow my processor away in benchmarks/gaming/etc., it really wouldn't make any difference in my day-to-day stuff. Even ripping the occasional DVD or something -- it might take an hour and a half on my computer...but with Hyperthreading, I can multitask easily, so I'm not really missing anything.
...and you still can't buy a soundcard for it :D
Xir
According to Digitimes, it appears it might be.
However considering Nvidia's past launches in October and November and there have been some reports of silicon already being run off, I'd suggest "highly likely".
Why was I not informed?
Oh fudge nuggets... almost trade up time, so soon? :(
Unfortunately, with the implementation of HDCP, you'd need a new monitor, GFX card AND Vista to play either HD format. :(
not even my high end rig does HD direct yet (no drive, and my 30" doesn't do HDCP)
a year and a half ago when i upped from a 9600pro to my x850pro i was amazed.
since my monitor is only 1280x768, games still play fine.
with a new wife and daughter, i can not afford to build a new pc at all. especially not for gaming. $250 to $300 for a video card, i might be able to scrounge for. and it would probably hold up my system until my monitor dies, and i get to buy something in the 24" range.
Seems like the sorta thing they'd do at the moment.