AGP Not Yet Dead Says Gigabyte

[DXRick]

What are you people smoking? I could buy this card at say 150$ CAN and have better faster graphics than I have now OR I could buy a CPU 200$, RAM 100$, MB 100$ and a new graphics card at 200$ which totals 600$ + tax for much better faster graphics? Hmm, I think I'll go for the cheaper option for now until I'm willing to shell out major money for major improvements.

Enthusiast KIDS often miss the point, so I don't blame most of you here... Wait until you're an adult with other things to pay, you won't feel the same way anymore.

Wrong! If you have an AGP mobo, it implies that you have a chipset that supports DDR memory and socket 478 CPUs. The next chipset from Intel added DDR2, PCIe 16x, and socket 775. I remember this, because when I bought the 865PERL board and P4 3.0, socket 775 boards were just hitting the market.

You don't need to spend nearly that much to get a massive increase in speed.

Check out This combo deal on NewEgg. E5200, P43 mobo, 4G DDR2, and Geforce 9600 GSO for $249 USD.

This is just an example, but instead of spending even $100-150 on an AGP card, you can get a massive increase in gaming power for under $300 easily!

 

[ShadowFlash]

Wrong! If you have an AGP mobo, it implies that you have a chipset that supports DDR memory and socket 478 CPUs. The next chipset from Intel added DDR2, PCIe 16x, and socket 775. I remember this, because when I bought the 865PERL board and P4 3.0, socket 775 boards were just hitting the market.

You don't need to spend nearly that much to get a massive increase in speed.

Check out This combo deal on NewEgg. E5200, P43 mobo, 4G DDR2, and Geforce 9600 GSO for $249 USD.

This is just an example, but instead of spending even $100-150 on an AGP card, you can get a massive increase in gaming power for under $300 easily!

Still does not apply to any of my 4 machines listed....so you are not comparing a "high-end" AGP system. If gaming is your ONLY motivation, then yes you are partitially right. How does having AGP imply a socket 478 ? That is just absurd. You cannot upgrade a decent workstation for $300, as it's typical use of SCSI means you now need HDD's and controller card replacements. Newer AGP cards however will breathe new life into the old system for $100. Still waiting for a build to replace my AGP rig for $300......

 

[Guest]

This article is ripe with inaccuraces.

First off AGP was phased out LONG LONG before it hit a bandwidth bottle neck. It could have gone an additional 3 more years without hitting any real bottlenecks, but that wouldnt have sold motherboards. It easily would have lasted for 2007 gpus and possibly 2008 gpus.

Second off, there are hybrid AGP and PCI Express motherboards. I dont know if you can run a card in each slot at the same time, but i assume you can. Considering agp motherbaords could handle a card in the agp slot and in the old pci slots at the same time, no reason to believe it wouldnt be able to handle one in an agp and pci express slot at the same time. I never owned one, but i know there are several of them out there. I considered buying one a few years back as a transition board. But i couldnt find one for a reasonable price, that had reasonable overclocking features.

The AGP interface was only just starting to show signs of bandwith issues about 3 years after pci express was introduced. The last benchmark i saw between a pci and agp equivalent(sorta, the agp card had much slower ram, and the gpu was clocked slower), only showed a small difference in fps benchmarks, that article was on either toms or anandtech. Most of that difference was very likely due to the ram and clock difference and not any bottleneck. I believe this was a 2000 series ati card, tho it could have been a 3000, its been about a year now so i cant remember the exact gpu. So a couple generations out of date now, but at the time it was the current gen.

A modern gpu on the AGP interface would still do quite well in games.

And for the record my main system is pci express. Tho if they made modern midrange graphics card on AGP i would not have bought my current system last year, id still be on AGP.

 

[DXRick]

Still does not apply to any of my 4 machines listed....so you are not comparing a "high-end" AGP system. If gaming is your ONLY motivation, then yes you are partitially right. How does having AGP imply a socket 478 ? That is just absurd. You cannot upgrade a decent workstation for $300, as it's typical use of SCSI means you now need HDD's and controller card replacements. Newer AGP cards however will breathe new life into the old system for $100. Still waiting for a build to replace my AGP rig for $300......

I read your responses above. Frankly, I have no idea why you are on this thread, which is talking about people with old AGP systems trying to eek out more gaming performance with only a GPU upgrade. My response assumes that you can reuse all of the other components (hard drive(s), case, etc.) and may have to pay another $50 or so for a new PSU.

You obviously cannot do this, because of your HD setup. But, then it is generally assumed that anyone that spent that much money on a high end workstation is likely using an expensive workstation GPU as well and is not averse to spending what it takes to get a modern rig. If you did not build that rig for 3D rendering or CAD software (which benefit greatly from workstation GPUs), why did you build it?

Still, your situation is not that different from mine. Your dual Xenon 3.06s are no faster than my P4 3.0 (except at some multhithreaded apps and games). So, buying a new AGP card for that system won't do much for you, unless you are looking to make older games (like Oblivion, HL2, Doom 3, Diablo 2, etc.) run faster. Also, the CPUs will still bottleneck 3D rendering and CAD programs. Even THG's latest $600 SBM build will run circles around your old workstation build, regardless of what GPU you stick into it.

 

[ShadowFlash]

I read your responses above. Frankly, I have no idea why you are on this thread, which is talking about people with old AGP systems trying to eek out more gaming performance with only a GPU upgrade. My response assumes that you can reuse all of the other components (hard drive(s), case, etc.) and may have to pay another $50 or so for a new PSU.

You obviously cannot do this, because of your HD setup. But, then it is generally assumed that anyone that spent that much money on a high end workstation is likely using an expensive workstation GPU as well and is not averse to spending what it takes to get a modern rig. If you did not build that rig for 3D rendering or CAD software (which benefit greatly from workstation GPUs), why did you build it?

Still, your situation is not that different from mine. Your dual Xenon 3.06s are no faster than my P4 3.0 (except at some multhithreaded apps and games). So, buying a new AGP card for that system won't do much for you, unless you are looking to make older games (like Oblivion, HL2, Doom 3, Diablo 2, etc.) run faster. Also, the CPUs will still bottleneck 3D rendering and CAD programs. Even THG's latest $600 SBM build will run circles around your old workstation build, regardless of what GPU you stick into it.

My point is that there are many scenarios where a simple $100 upgrade is the most cost effective and logical way to go. Most of my systems from that era used scsi drives and controller cards. It hasn't been until recently that we've seen an explosion in HDD performance and previously scsi was the only way to achieve "enthusiast-level" performance. Of course this is not my primary system now, but the fact remains that it's still in use and I certainly won't be throwing it away anytime soon. While yes, I do CAD work, the original purpose of that particular build was a home machine to game and stream multi-media. And my machine is definately much faster than your P4 3.0. Hulu is a good example there. Clock speed isn't everything. While gaming benchmarks are widely used for reference, a good video card has other home-type multi-media uses as well. I agree it would take about $500-600 to surpass it by a justifiable level and that's my point. Some people just don't want to ( or can't ) spend $500 for casual use including light gaming. It's certainly nice to recommend a brand new machine to anyone with an AGP sysytem ( it's to those yokels I was originally replying to ), there are many times where that same old system could benefit from a GPU upgrade to be used as a second ( or 3rd or 4th etc. ) machine. To globably dismiss such products ignores the very large user base that still could benefit from them.

My IDE RAID isn't that uncommon either by the way, and was a consumer product at the time. I would also have dificulty moving this array to a new system, which is why I left it in that box. I know you were "assuming" that all components would be re-used, and therin is the problem. Heck, most P4 systems used IDE drives, and simply transfering these to a new platform is increasingly difficult due to the lack of dual IDE channels on-board most new MB's. Upgrading the HDD's would be the first advice anyone would give, not transfering them. Finally the case...there are probablly more old P4 cases out there that don't lend themselves to upgrading components then there are ones that do. Have we all forgotten Dell's and there proprietary mounting points ? or others with non-standard sized PSU's ? Not too mention poor layouts and even worse cooling flow. All of these examples would require more than the latest newegg combo deal to complete an upgrade. At least you mentioned the power supply itself, many before you conveniently left that out.

In a perfect cookie-cutter world, by all means upgrade the whole system, but in real life, swinging $100 can be easier, especially for technophobes.

Edit: There was nothing in the original news brief, nor any of the comments globally dismissing AGP, to be in direct reference to new games or even gaming in general. There are many out there perfectly content to play diablo 2, neverwinter nights 1 ( with the PRC pack ), and other "old" titles that would benefit.

 

[graviongr]

AGP isn't dead yet, people keep saying it is, but that doesn't make it true.

It's true that a P4 Prescott 3.3ghz or higher, 2gb RAM, and a HD3850 can play Crysis at decent settings. I played it at global medium settings with textures and physics set on high at almost 30fps. Looked pretty good.

Also, I just bought an FX5200 AGP card to put in a PC with an open AGP slot, the client wanted to hook up an old PC to his TV (CRT SDTV) so he can watch Hulu.com programming on his living room television. Problem was that his onboard video only had VGA out. The new AGP card will allow him to use S-video out and now he can enjoy Hulu in his living room.

For $30 he turned a PC that was about to be trashed into an internet television device, as now he can enjoy shows not just from hulu.com, but from all other sources of online television.

There is still a market for AGP cards, and this card will fill a niche segment nicely and I have no doubt in my mind at all that there will be a small market for this card.

 

[hixbot]

I'd like to point out that even some slower AGP systems can benefit from these cards, I'm not talking gaming. Full DXVA decoding of 1080p content. So far just the 3650, 3850, and now 4650 can provide that on the AGP bus. I've seen 1.0ghz Athlons easily decode 1080p content with the help of DXVA. The 4650 being the only one that can also support CTM, Stream, and OpenCL GPU programming. These cards can breathe life into old systems in a variety of ways. Nvidia is missing a market here. They push CUDA and Pure Video, but they ignore AGP? Old systems perhaps need those technologies most.

 

[christophero1973]

COD4 plays just fine on my 10 year-old Compaq SP750 with: RAMBUS, DUAL 1Ghz P3 XEONS, P-SCSI and x4 AGP-PRO slot.

 

[tyger13us]

I have a amd barton 2500+ running @ 2,250 on a msi nforce2 delta mobo with 2 gigs of ddr400 pc3200 2.5-3-3-8 @ 2.7v in dual channel mode with this new gigabyte GV-R465D2-1GI agp 8x card..

Im playing crysis fluidly on "All medium settings" (no aa or anything like that though),,,, but it dont skip a beat and plays rather well @ 1600x1200 considering...