Advil,
That's a marketing myth. Clock a pci-e vid card's GPU down to the same speed as the AGP equivalent (same pipelines, same onboard mem bandwidth, etc), and they perform within 1% of each other. That's one reason why nvidia cripples AGP cards by disabling pipelines, then releases them with the same name as pci-e cards with all pipelines running. It's a marketing trick to get people to switch away from agp.
I'm 100% in agreement that AGP needs to die, but that's because the AGP spec itself has limitations and needs to be put down. But it has nothing to do with the performance you'll get with single identical cards on a PCI-e or AGP bus.
Most memory accesses are on the local on-card memory. Even pci-e transfers are too slow to be useful in gaming. Everyone knows that. In reality, the agp vs. pci-e has nothing to do with single-card speeds. It has to do with pci-e being able to run more full speed devices. It's a better and more useful technology overall. But one AGP card vs. one pci-e card discussions come down to marketing tricks like nvidia's insistence on crippling their AGP offerings. Look it up yourself... Start with comparing the AGP 6800GT with any pci-e 6800 with the same specs (gpu and mem clocks, mem type, and same number of pipes) and you'll see that they're pretty much identical.
That's a marketing myth. Clock a pci-e vid card's GPU down to the same speed as the AGP equivalent (same pipelines, same onboard mem bandwidth, etc), and they perform within 1% of each other. That's one reason why nvidia cripples AGP cards by disabling pipelines, then releases them with the same name as pci-e cards with all pipelines running. It's a marketing trick to get people to switch away from agp.
I'm 100% in agreement that AGP needs to die, but that's because the AGP spec itself has limitations and needs to be put down. But it has nothing to do with the performance you'll get with single identical cards on a PCI-e or AGP bus.
Most memory accesses are on the local on-card memory. Even pci-e transfers are too slow to be useful in gaming. Everyone knows that. In reality, the agp vs. pci-e has nothing to do with single-card speeds. It has to do with pci-e being able to run more full speed devices. It's a better and more useful technology overall. But one AGP card vs. one pci-e card discussions come down to marketing tricks like nvidia's insistence on crippling their AGP offerings. Look it up yourself... Start with comparing the AGP 6800GT with any pci-e 6800 with the same specs (gpu and mem clocks, mem type, and same number of pipes) and you'll see that they're pretty much identical.