Home page » Graphics

Search:

Refine search for Graphics

Despite what every manufacturer, publication and advert wants to make you believe, AGP is not dead. Almost all of my friends and family still use AGP, much to their dismay, as when they are looking to me for an free upgrade, all I have is PCI Express cards to hand.

If you have a fairly decent AGP rig, with say a 3400+ or 3.2GHz Pentium 4, it's a tough situation to be in, as upgrading will likely involve throwing away most of the components in your system. DDR has moved to DDR2, AGP has moved to PCI Express and most of the CPU sockets have changed too. If you have a Socket 939 AGP system, it's not quite as bad, as you can buy a newer nForce4 board for under £60, but this is a fairly rare situation to be in.

SLI/CrossFire is one of the only real benefits to PCI-E and most games are limited by graphics processing power rather than CPU power, so if you're not looking to go down that route, why not consider sticking with your current system and just buying a new AGP card?

Both ATI and nVidia have bridge chips available, so in theory almost all of their PCI Express range can be moved to AGP. Obviously, they want to promote their latest cards, so AGP isn't getting that much attention – but the cards are out there.

This is more than likely, the last time we look at any AGP hardware. So this is your last chance before taking the plunge into PCI Express.

Above you can see a PCI Express graphics card compared to an AGP card. They are not at all interchangeable, so make sure you buy the right one. One of my house mates managed to buy the wrong one, and instead of sending back the card – is now building an entirely new machine. Silly boy.

When it came to testing, I actually struggled to find a machine old enough, but after hunting around the labs, I managed to find an Athlon 64 FX-51 (2.2GHz) and a Leadtek K8NW Pro motherboard (nForce 3). Being Socket 940, I had to use registered memory – so in went 1GB of Corsair registered memory. Although the FX-51 was overly expensive at the time and very few people bought it, the performance should be about the same as later more affordable chips making it representative of a fairly good AGP system.

I tested this in the same way I test our PCI Express graphics cards, using SpodeMark 3D. As the resolutions climbed higher, the frame rates were getting so low that the machine would eventually pack up and crash. Because of this, I have excluded 2,048 x 1,536 from the testing.

I used the 91.31 ForceWare drivers and ATI's 6.8 Catalyst drivers.

I ran Call of Duty 2, Counter Strike: Source, Quake 4, Battlefield 2, Prey and 3DMark06. Bar 3DMark06, these all run using our in-house pre-recorded timedemos in the most intense sections of each game I could find. Each setting is run three times and the average is taken, for reproducible and accurate results. I ran each game test at 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1,920 x 1,200 each at 0x FSAA with trilinear filtering, 2x FSAA with 4x AF and 4x FSAA with 8x AF.

Add your comment

© 2003-2009 TrustedReviews & IPC Media
About Us | Contact Us | Legal | Privacy | RSS