Long Live AGP

[Malladine]

Ok Jeff, mr PCI-E advocate , please provide realtime gaming benchmarks in which a pci-e card beats it's equivalent agp card by a noteworthy margin. Say, 20%. Consistently.

Or are you saying that sometime in the future pci-e will show, um, benefits? If so, can you tell me why other than "interface, latency, bandwidth". If i'm to accept those reasons, i need to know why we aren't seeing any improvements now. 3d algorithms not advanced enough? Systems bottlenecked by other parts?

I like technology. I will not, however, embrace a technology that seems to improve very little.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Malladine
Ok Jeff, mr PCI-E advocate , please provide realtime gaming benchmarks in which a pci-e card beats it's equivalent agp card by a noteworthy margin. Say, 20%. Consistently.

Or are you saying that sometime in the future pci-e will show, um, benefits? If so, can you tell me why other than "interface, latency, bandwidth". If i'm to accept those reasons, i need to know why we aren't seeing any improvements now. 3d algorithms not advanced enough? Systems bottlenecked by other parts?

I like technology. I will not, however, embrace a technology that seems to improve very little.

Lets turn our nose up at SATA while we're at it since hard drives can't saturate even an ATA100 bus.

Now do you see my point?

 

[blckgrffn]

Anybody remember early chipsets with PC133 vs DDR2100? Most showed little to no improvement. Would you still like to be on SDR DRAM now? Let us hope that more devices are faster and require this bandwidth and lower latency. Also, when AGP came out for video cards, there wasn't much of a difference, either...

And let's not forget the low end really benefits from the newer bus, TC or hyper memory are great illustrations of this.

 

[Malladine]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Malladine
Ok Jeff, mr PCI-E advocate , please provide realtime gaming benchmarks in which a pci-e card beats it's equivalent agp card by a noteworthy margin. Say, 20%. Consistently.

Or are you saying that sometime in the future pci-e will show, um, benefits? If so, can you tell me why other than "interface, latency, bandwidth". If i'm to accept those reasons, i need to know why we aren't seeing any improvements now. 3d algorithms not advanced enough? Systems bottlenecked by other parts?

I like technology. I will not, however, embrace a technology that seems to improve very little.

Lets turn our nose up at SATA while we're at it since hard drives can't saturate even an ATA100 bus.

Now do you see my point?

Well sure, your point is that new tech is good in it's own right. My point is new tech is garbage if it doesn't produce real world improvements. Maybe it will, someday, and that's cool and of course new tech is indeed good as it stands, but I can certainly understand the lack of respect being shown pci-e currently. It's just not exciting

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Malladine

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Malladine
Ok Jeff, mr PCI-E advocate , please provide realtime gaming benchmarks in which a pci-e card beats it's equivalent agp card by a noteworthy margin. Say, 20%. Consistently.

Or are you saying that sometime in the future pci-e will show, um, benefits? If so, can you tell me why other than "interface, latency, bandwidth". If i'm to accept those reasons, i need to know why we aren't seeing any improvements now. 3d algorithms not advanced enough? Systems bottlenecked by other parts?

I like technology. I will not, however, embrace a technology that seems to improve very little.

Lets turn our nose up at SATA while we're at it since hard drives can't saturate even an ATA100 bus.

Now do you see my point?

Well sure, your point is that new tech is good in it's own right. My point is new tech is garbage if it doesn't produce real world improvements. Maybe it will, someday, and that's cool and of course new tech is indeed good as it stands, but I can certainly understand the lack of respect being shown pci-e currently. It's just not exciting

I agree, it's not exciting. I also said earlier you're an idiot if you upgrade JUST to have PCI-Express instead of AGP. But if you're buying a new rig, why not go with PCI-Express? There's no question as to whether it will be used in the future, and there's no question that AGP is on it's way out. Nobody's saying get rid of your Socket A platform because it'll never be compatible with PCI-Express... and nobody's saying sell your nForce3 and AGP 6800GT and buy an nForce4 and PCI-Express 6800GT. What I'm saying is it's rediculous to have some sort of emotional attatchment to AGP and resist new technology because of it.

 

[Malladine]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Malladine

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Malladine
Ok Jeff, mr PCI-E advocate , please provide realtime gaming benchmarks in which a pci-e card beats it's equivalent agp card by a noteworthy margin. Say, 20%. Consistently.

Or are you saying that sometime in the future pci-e will show, um, benefits? If so, can you tell me why other than "interface, latency, bandwidth". If i'm to accept those reasons, i need to know why we aren't seeing any improvements now. 3d algorithms not advanced enough? Systems bottlenecked by other parts?

I like technology. I will not, however, embrace a technology that seems to improve very little.

Lets turn our nose up at SATA while we're at it since hard drives can't saturate even an ATA100 bus.

Now do you see my point?

Well sure, your point is that new tech is good in it's own right. My point is new tech is garbage if it doesn't produce real world improvements. Maybe it will, someday, and that's cool and of course new tech is indeed good as it stands, but I can certainly understand the lack of respect being shown pci-e currently. It's just not exciting

I agree, it's not exciting. I also said earlier you're an idiot if you upgrade JUST to have PCI-Express instead of AGP. But if you're buying a new rig, why not go with PCI-Express? There's no question as to whether it will be used in the future, and there's no question that AGP is on it's way out. Nobody's saying get rid of your Socket A platform because it'll never be compatible with PCI-Express... and nobody's saying sell your nForce3 and AGP 6800GT and buy an nForce4 and PCI-Express 6800GT. What I'm saying is it's rediculous to have some sort of emotional attatchment to AGP and resist new technology because of it.

The resistance stems from the excitement part, ie: "Why should I be 'forced' into this new technology that I'm not even interested in. It messes up my upgrade path! Now I have to buy a new motherboard if I want the best video cards! :frown:"

yes, being emotionally attached to a graphics slot is retarded but being emotionally repelled from new, seemingly useless technology that you can't really avoid is understandable.

This is really only valid as regards upgrading. When buying new there should be no questions.

:beer: for an adult conversation

 

[Jeff7181]

Bottom line... if you balk at spending money on a new motherboard and new CPU in order to use a top of the line video card, you shouldn't be buying a top of the line video card. There are PLEANTY of mid-range components that would better fit your needs.

 

[TGS]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Bottom line... if you balk at spending money on a new motherboard and new CPU in order to use a top of the line video card, you shouldn't be buying a top of the line video card. There are PLEANTY of mid-range components that would better fit your needs.

So once again, seeing as how I have an upgrade budget for a new card. If I go above my 500 dollar limit I really should be purchasing a mid range card instead? I've already mentioned the ability to make an agp card based from PCIE natives has already been done. Purchasing cards over the $400 mark is not where the majority of profits are made, and it's quite silly to say that if you scoff at purchases beyond a certain dollar value I shouldn't be looking at an upgrade that has *real* tangible performance gains over my current hardware.

I've already mentioned that besides disk controllers (of course multiple chained drives will saturate the PCI/SATA/SCSI busses we now use), practically no other devices will. Can you tell me a single device that will provide a joe-six pack benefits from using a PCIE version over a PCI version? I'm having some serious difficulties trying to find something.

If you've ever had a look at real server style motherboards you can see they've worked around the majority of bus contention issues with discrete multi-bus platforms. Only the consumer boards suffer from putting all devices on a single bus, which for the future is a great idea to develop standards to accomedate growth.

If nVidia came out with a AGP bridge 7800GTX, I would gladly pay for it and have performance gains well over what I could attain with two 6800GTs in SLI in some situations. I don't agree with the OP saying my socket A performs like an A64 at equal clocks or anything that may insinuate that. I also don't agree with statements like, "to future proof your rig..." when there are no devices that will take advantage of what PCIE offers.

Other than perhaps professional level sound cards, which is beyond my realm of expertise, all of todays devices demand either PCI or AGP levels of bandwidth. Nothing out takes anywhere near PCIE levels of bandwidth in a single card configuration. Latency isn't an issue as todays devices are designed with PCI or AGP in mind.

Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm really looking at evgas combo deal 7800+PCIE board. Only due to the fact that I can sneak the 7800 under my computer budget radar with that deal. Though I suppose I should look for something in the mid tier range to replace my 6800GT

 

[SonicIce]

that athlon xp is prolly equal to a 2800+ athlon 64. nice overclock on the videocard though