Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4650: Are AGP Graphics Still Good Enough?

[matobinder]

Good to see AGP solutions still out there. I hung on to my older Dell, that had 2.8Ghz Northwood, 2 gigs of RDRAM, and I had upgraded to a 7600GS. That machine still basically plays most everything I threw at it, I'm not much of a gamer. But I finally set it aside as its nice just to have a newer machine. It was over 6 years old.

 

[Guest]

This article is flawed, given few points about old tech:

1. I do have X2 3800+/GeForce 9800 PCIe, Far Cry 2 runs ultra smooth except in central hub towns that contradicts the less-than-20 result and the conclusion CPU is capping performance.
2. 29 FPS is not just wholesale unacceptable, it is quite high, but perceived slowness of graphics is in fact in variation of FPS output, dips in rate translate to slowness.
3. AGP is not a budget choice but more of a forced course of action due to the economics of market and necessity.

 

[matt_b]

[citation][nom]Mach5Motorsport[/nom]Congrats to Gigabyte for showing that the AGP format isn't dead. Pretty much exposes once and for all that PCIe was just an excuse to force upgrades on users.[/citation]
Everything is always in preparation for a couple of generations down the line. Should we throw in a PCI graphics card in the mix to show how the technology has progressed over the last 10-15 years for gaming? I am sure that if they made a 4870x2 in AGP form, that the bus would be hit incredibly hard with bandwidth issues. I am thinking in terms of something like USB 2.0 having a theoretical yield of 480mb/sec, yet when has anyone seen speeds anywhere near that (a millisecond does not count)? I am sure that with the 2 mb/sec limit of AGP 8x, the transfer of data through the bus slows exponentially the closer the transfer speed reaches that maximum speed - rather than hitting the limit in full stride and then hanging at 2 mb/sec.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]Airborne11b[/nom]Considering that you can build sub- $600 systems with PCI-E, I don't see the point of AGP anymore.[/citation]

The point is, spending far less than $600 on an old system might make it viable, instead of spendning $600 on a new system. In fact, in part 2 we show that spending $150 can turn an old AGP system into a viable gamer.


[citation][nom]Airborne11b[/nom]And there are no "CPU Bottle necks" here. [/citation]

The benchmark numbers from Part 2 disagree with you, as the 3850 performs twice as fast in Crysis with the faster CPU compared to the 3800+ in Part 1.

 

[Guest]

Y'know, actually not much of the long forgotten AGP rigs have dual core CPUs. Most of them are Socket 478/Socket A rigs, which means that even HD4650 is an overkill.

 

[VChuck]

Cleeve, thanks for your reply .I'll have to get 4650/3850 agp then.Good to know that my old p-4's can be put to good use still.missed that article you mentioned.
Kinda OT but I would have replied sooner had I not had to spend the better part of the day reformatting,updating, cause of these bad trojan's that got in my machine. It went through my defenses like nothing.I could'nt play STALKER CS.
S**t is it me or getting worse everyday?

 

[mapesdhs]

That's why I have an IRIX system as a gateway/firewall running ipfilter, stops all
that stuff getting through. 8)

Don't know if trojan stuff is getting worse, but email spam seems to have dropped
off a lot in the last year or so.

Ian.

 

[jamesro]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]Actually, thie article *IS* the part 2... it just happened so long ago, I decided not to call it part 2.But Part 3 (what we're going to call the new part 2) is now gettiong prepped for publishing.[/citation]


WELL ABOUT TIME!
OVER A YEAR AND A BIT and its come

at least it came here....EVENTUALLY like you said it would

please dont let it happen again...

 

[cleeve]

please dont let it happen again...

Can't guarantee that, unfortunately.

Sorry James, but life is what happens while you're making other plans. All I can do is try my best.

 

[Guest]

Memory is supposed to be in matched pairs. If 4 sims are inserted then all 4 are supposed to be of the same type and speed. (Read the motherboard manual.) What we have here is a kluge of 2 matched pairs of 512k, a single 1meg, and a single 512k. I'm surprised that the motherboard even booted! How much of the so called "cpu" bottle-neck is really due to this mismatched memory? I would like to see the test done with just the 2 matched 512k sticks.

 

[mapesdhs]

Not sure it's wise trying to obtain meaningful benchmark numbers for games like
Crysis on a system with only 1GB RAM. Better to have either four matched 512MB
or 2 x 1GB.

Ian.

 

[cleeve]

Memory is supposed to be in matched pairs. If 4 sims are inserted then all 4 are supposed to be of the same type and speed. (Read the motherboard manual.) What we have here is a kluge of 2 matched pairs of 512k, a single 1meg, and a single 512k. I'm surprised that the motherboard even booted! How much of the so called "cpu" bottle-neck is really due to this mismatched memory? I would like to see the test done with just the 2 matched 512k sticks.

Why would you be surprised it would boot? Memory works in all kinds of combinations.

The only performance issue would be running the memory in single channel instead of dual channel mode, and that would account for less than a 5% performance difference.

 

[jeffredo]

Kind of unsatisfying test. Why didn't they include that last, great ATI designed and officially supported AGP card - the X1950 Pro? Its still for sale and I'm curious how it would have stacked up to these third party bridge-chip cards. The X700 is kind of useless in mix.

 

[mapesdhs]

I think I already pretty much covered that point... ;D (see my previous posts)

Ian.

 

[techpops]

I'm still using AGP, HD3850 running on an ASROCK motherboard that's both AM2 and supports AGP. So I get the niceties of DDR2 and faster CPU's and still hang on to the graphics card.

I can play most games at higher resolutions with most details on but the AAA titles can be a problem. I can't get GTA IV to run anything about 20fps for instance. But things like Fallout3 ran great at 1680x.

The real bottleneck for me is that the drivers are just simply not updated anymore for the motherboard so I'm stuck with XP support only. No Vista or Windows 7 for me, at least not for gaming. I can run the OS's just not accelerated graphics within those OS's.

I'm hanging onto this until it annoys me enough to upgrade. Right now I'm not very annoyed and get fine performance. I'm sure the next round of games will put a stop to that.

 

[techpops]

Forgot to add, running an X2 4400+ which I guess just helps that bit more over the 3800 in this article. I still might upgrade the CPU to a newer AMD CPU but money is a little too tight to mention right now.

 

[amdfangirl]

Here's my vote for adding a 4670 in part 2! I also would have preferred to see an X800 instead of an X700 which really wasn't a great card even in it's day.

You have my vote too!

I wanna crack open my Athlon XP, just one more time.

 

[em7]

Um... where is the World in Conflict test page?

 

[immerstark]

I have one of those Asrock boards and when I was researching the am2 daughter board I discovered that it only works with 90 nanometer processors, so you are limited to Windsor and Manchester for the dual cores, no Brisbane or Agena(I had really wanted an x2 5000 black edition and hoped for a Phenom upgrade later). That is what prompted me to hold off for a while and upgrade to an am3 board and PII processor.

 

[mapesdhs]

Which is why it's so strange that Asrock would add PII support to such a low-cost
board like the AM2NF3-VSTA. For someone who has an AGP card on the type of AM2 board
that needs an addon card to exploit later CPUs, it would be cheaper to just replace
the mbd with this model instead since it already supports up to PII X4 3.2GHz.

I'd love to know why Asrock supports older boards in this way. When I asked ASUS
why theire support was so poor by comparison for expensive boards like the one
I'm using now, their excuse was that it's no longer in production. Neither is the
VSTA board, but that doesn't stop Asrock from releasing further BIOS updates.

Either way, there are cheaper options for gaining access to newer CPUs and buying
the expansion card for boards that can use them. In some cases one has to change
the RAM aswell, but the old RAM can be sold off to help cover that, and RAM is
cheap now anyway.

Ian.

 

[techpops]

Without a doubt, today you'd be mad to buy into AGP, but for those on really tight budgets where a new mobo, memory, cpu and gpu or combination's of is just too much to buy at once, its still just about viable for an OK machine that gets most things done.

I'm currently torn between AM2+ with all the trimmings or el cheapo AM3 for my next board. AM3 seems like the way forward but for half the price you can get a feature rich AM2 board that can of course tap into your current DDD2 memory making it even more attractive. Decisions decisions!

 

[amdfangirl]

I reckon buying a board just with AGP is going backwards given I only buy matx or smaller... what happens when you wanna upgrade eh?

 

[mapesdhs]

Certainly if buying new one would not get an AGP board, but for those upgrading who want to
have a better CPU while retaining an existing AGP card, my point is valid, ie. there are cheaper
and better options than buying the expansion card for those boards which offer better CPUs in
this way. In other words, even with the expansion card added, some boards don't support CPUs
newer than the Phenom1.

As someone said earlier, not everyone wants to upgrade/replace their whole system at the
same time, eg. perhaps they can't afford to. Doing it in carefully planned stages can be very
effective, which is what I did. For my first upgrade, I retained the gfx card, disks and media
drives. For my 2nd upgrade, I retained the CPU, RAM, disks, option cards and media drives.

Ian.

 

[hixbot]

Not sure why I get voted down for asking about testing of HTPC features. For many people on AGP machines with slow CPUs, DXVA is our ONLY way to get 1080p playback. Here comes a low power, low heat AGP card, with HDMI output, including possible HD sound. These things need to be tested!

 

[Mach5Motorsport]

[citation][nom]Matt_B[/nom]Everything is always in preparation for a couple of generations down the line. Should we throw in a PCI graphics card in the mix to show how the technology has progressed over the last 10-15 years for gaming? I am sure that if they made a 4870x2 in AGP form, that the bus would be hit incredibly hard with bandwidth issues. I am thinking in terms of something like USB 2.0 having a theoretical yield of 480mb/sec, yet when has anyone seen speeds anywhere near that (a millisecond does not count)? I am sure that with the 2 mb/sec limit of AGP 8x, the transfer of data through the bus slows exponentially the closer the transfer speed reaches that maximum speed - rather than hitting the limit in full stride and then hanging at 2 mb/sec.[/citation]
YOu are pointing to a static figure, rather than real world playability.
The whole point of PCIe was that it was out of the box supposedly so superior a video interface standard. That just wasn't the case.
The actual marketplace demand was circumvented by Intel. Multi core CPUs and faster RAM with GPUs prove this fallacy that AGP can provide still similar results to PCIe 2.0 equivalents.