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How important is pci-e now?

F

Fryguy8

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
1,707
If I'm looking to build a gaming machine, how important is it to wait for pci-e? It seems that AGP hasn't been maxed out really yet, so if I went with like the current top-end ATI, and then in a year or 2 just did a motherboard swap to pci-e, would I really be missing anything?

I just don't know how much longer I can wait for a new comp, and if I can get a nice socket 939 system (or intel EE, not 100% sure yet), sans pci-e, I think I'm going to just do that.

Besides graphics, what does pci-e help?
 
As I see it, if your thinking about keeping your video card for more than 2 years (very viable, think about the Radeon 9700NP/PRO, still plays everything well), getting an AGP card is not going to happen. Boards in a year or two will completely phase it out, and very few new boards even have them. The Intel 915/925 chipset boards will have a PCI-bus based AGP slot = 133 mbs vs 2.1 gig/sec ala MAJOR performance loss (Running your card in non agp mode basically). The newer 939 boards will have AGP support, but eventually that will be phased out as well.

So basically, if you change cards very often, then don't worry about it. If you want it to last, wait till fall, buy a cheap pci-express board and get a kick ass pci-e graphics card.
 
If he's the kind of person who keeps his card for 2 years he doesn't strike me as the kind of person who changes their mobo every 2 months. PCI-E isn't big. It won't be for a good while yet.
 
Not saying he should change his board very often. He can very well get a quality PCI-express board and upgrade that whenever he wants, in a year or two as well.
 
Buy agp now, I dont think we will see it going much of anywhere for at least 2 years. PCI-E will be here, but it wont be leaps and bounds past AGP for a while.

Plus if you waited on PCI-E, the way it seems that video card manufacturers are working, we might not even see those till Q4 of this year.
 
Not even a little.

Games today aren't close to maxing out the 4X AGP standard, much less the 8X AGP standard. If 8X doesn't make a preformance difference over 4X...why the hell would anyone want 16X?
 
jsn117 said:
Not even a little.

Games today aren't close to maxing out the 4X AGP standard, much less the 8X AGP standard. If 8X doesn't make a preformance difference over 4X...why the hell would anyone want 16X?
Click to expand...

Why do people overclock when they have 3+Ghz?
People will always want more, true it might not help much but it may give an extra frame.
 
Darakian said:
Why do people overclock when they have 3+Ghz?
People will always want more, true it might not help much but it may give an extra frame.
Click to expand...

Current GPU's stand to gain absoutely NOTHING from PCI-e. Since they arent maxing out their current pipeline to system memory, a wider one is pointless for now.

At the moment the difference between PCI-e and AGP 8x is the same as the difference between thowing a hotdog down a hallway and thowing it down a subway tunnel.

As the on-board memory on these cards gets to be a larger and larger amount, PCI-e will become an even smaller factor. If DRAM prices continue to have lower dips in their rollercoaster pricing, there will come a day when we will be running cards on PCI-e that would run just as well in an AGP 8x slot. :rolleyes:

Go go pointless slot upgrades!
 
jsn117 said:
Not even a little.

Games today aren't close to maxing out the 4X AGP standard, much less the 8X AGP standard. If 8X doesn't make a preformance difference over 4X...why the hell would anyone want 16X?
Click to expand...

There are other advantages PCI-E has over AGP, but you're essentially correct. In terms of raw bus speed, there's simply no advantage. There will be eventually since Longhorn and DX10 will make use of the bus a lot more, but that's years away. The other advantages include lower bus latency and a bidirectional ability. Both of these require software support before they become really useful, and I think as far as developers are concerned that is a long way away.

PCI-E, beyond video cards, will have a more immediate impact, however. It's more efficient from a CPU utilization standpoint, and it also adds more bandwidth for devices that are commonly limited by the PCI bus today. For instance, SATA; SATA-150 is actually limited to 133 MB/s regardless, and SATA-300 is equally worthless until PCI-E is available. Ethernet will also become more efficient, particularly Gbit ethernet. In fact, really all bus hardware will become more efficient, but that requires hardware changes and driver optimization to take effect. That is a ways off, although I expect SATA to benefit from PCI-E almost immediately.
 
Maxx said:
There are other advantages PCI-E has over AGP, but you're essentially correct. In terms of raw bus speed, there's simply no advantage. There will be eventually since Longhorn and DX10 will make use of the bus a lot more, but that's years away. The other advantages include lower bus latency and a bidirectional ability. Both of these require software support before they become really useful, and I think as far as developers are concerned that is a long way away.

PCI-E, beyond video cards, will have a more immediate impact, however. It's more efficient from a CPU utilization standpoint, and it also adds more bandwidth for devices that are commonly limited by the PCI bus today. For instance, SATA; SATA-150 is actually limited to 133 MB/s regardless, and SATA-300 is equally worthless until PCI-E is available. Ethernet will also become more efficient, particularly Gbit ethernet. In fact, really all bus hardware will become more efficient, but that requires hardware changes and driver optimization to take effect. That is a ways off, although I expect SATA to benefit from PCI-E almost immediately.
Click to expand...

I think putting hard drive access on the same bus as other peripherals is a backwards way of going about things.

This will turn out to be a benefit, but a direct dedicated SATA card bus would have been the way to go.
 
Lowtax said:
I think putting hard drive access on the same bus as other peripherals is a backwards way of going about things.

This will turn out to be a benefit, but a direct dedicated SATA card bus would have been the way to go.
Click to expand...

I concur from a performance standpoint, but hardware developers like to save money, which is why so many things are already more or less going over the PCI bus. It's simpler and easier to integrate. A dedicated bus is simply more expensive, and any add-in peripheral of that nature will go over the PCI-E bus anyway. You might not see this as the case in server setups in the future, though, since performance outweighs cost when applied to multiple users.
 
Maxx said:
I concur from a performance standpoint, but hardware developers like to save money, which is why so many things are already more or less going over the PCI bus. It's simpler and easier to integrate. A dedicated bus is simply more expensive, and any add-in peripheral of that nature will go over the PCI-E bus anyway. You might not see this as the case in server setups in the future, though, since performance outweighs cost when applied to multiple users.
Click to expand...

It is sad that the option won't be available to those of us who would really notice the difference.

PCI and AGP are fine the way they are, but the SATA spec creates the need for a higher speed bus. This bus should be optional, not forced down our throats as PCI-e is about to be.
 
bottom line if it´s only for gaming and not 3D modelling or similar go with AGP and let other do the beta testing with those spank new PCI E mainboards...
 
Lowtax said:
It is sad that the option won't be available to those of us who would really notice the difference.

PCI and AGP are fine the way they are, but the SATA spec creates the need for a higher speed bus. This bus should be optional, not forced down our throats as PCI-e is about to be.
Click to expand...

I would have to agree with you again, the option would be very nice. But then again, this is what happened with IDE...it got plopped essentially onto the PCI bus and is still there to this day (although the evolution was more symbiotic in that case). For those that remember the ISA-PCI changeover, you will probably suffer deja vu fairly soon...but the one key difference is 3D video cards. And unfortunately while I don't see any immediate benefit in that direction, hardware developers seem to be pushing PCI-E harder than PCI back then because of it.

I do think SATA will benefit from PCI-E, but not as much as it could. Honestly it is kind of ridiculous if you think about it; HDDs are generally the slowest factor in relation to importance in your system. But really the mentality is that only servers need it, although I do suspect some day it will become ordinary. But for the forseeable future, up to at least SATA-600, I expect desktop boards will just route the controller through PCI-E because it's simpler and cheaper. Eventually (I'm thinking 2008) this will change in order to reduce latency further and decrease CPU utilization when drive sizes and performance increase beyond the means of a truly "shared" bus.
 
I say if you want a card now; get one. I'm getting a 6800U ASAP. I upgrade my graphics card once every summer (last year was a 9800NP). I seriously doubt any game will come out between now and then a 6800U or a X800 can't handle. Granted, PCI-e is a step forward but I view it in the same light as most other computer parts. Buy it when you want it and NEVER look back.

The next best thing is always around the corner as such I'd still be waiting if I had waited for 939 A64 instead of getting a 3400 and a nf3 150 board (upgraded back in March). Even longer still I wanted PCI-e+939...
 
I haven't seen any type of performance figures between AGP and PCI-e but I doubt that PCI-e will have much if any impact on vid card performance. Early adopters of it will probably have many bugs to work out of it too.

As far as vid cards go, I don't see PCI-e as having much of an impact. When dealing with everything else that sits on the PCI bus currently, moving it to PCI-e will make a large difference as soon as they start making the hardware to work with the bus. Right now, the current PCI bus is a major bottleneck since so many things are trying to run on it and there isn't enough bandwidth for all of them. PCI-e should immediately take care of this as soon as the boards are running it and the expansion cards and whatnot are using it.

In other words, I personally wouldn't wait for a system upgrade just to get a PCI-e vid card to run on a PCI-e motherboard. Stick with AGP for now especially if you don't plan on upgrading for a couple more years. Just start saving up your money for a full system upgrade in a couple of years.
 
We probably won't see the majority of the PCI-express benifit until normal PCI is taken of the motherboard completely.

Videocards probably won't see much of a performance increase at first, mainly because most 3D applications are one-way data (CPU to videocard)

SATA (or even better SAS, serial attached SCSI) harddrives should see immediate benefit though, the bus is bidirectional, and you should be able to do a simultaneous read/write (buffering both) at the same time. Although the harddrive cannot physically do both at the same time, the command queing and bidirectional data nature should make large server users very, very happy.

PCI-E is pretty well the final step before going completely serial on all components. It is sorely needed sometime in the future if just to reduce CPU pincount and their nearing 1000+ pins (bend off one are you are screwed, grounding issues are glaring too) Going completely serial on all components should help with this problem, it also allows a computer that does not need to run on a set quartz-like clocktick, but on a heartbeat.
 
I think PCI-E will be about as important as PS3.0 is right now. We won't see games that take advantage of the extra horsepower for a good 18 months.
 
so then I'll just get a nice nforce-250 socket939 motherboard, pick up whatever is the fastest ATI card at the time, and enjoy it for a while ;)

There's no plans to change from 939 anytime soon is there? ie, in a year, if I want new motherboard/graphics, I won't have to drop $$$ for a new chip, right?
 
Fryguy8 said:
so then I'll just get a nice nforce-250 socket939 motherboard, pick up whatever is the fastest ATI card at the time, and enjoy it for a while ;)

There's no plans to change from 939 anytime soon is there? ie, in a year, if I want new motherboard/graphics, I won't have to drop $$$ for a new chip, right?
Click to expand...

OK, people aren't getting the point at ALL. Its not about whether or not PCI-express will be a big thing for graphics cards, we all know its not gonna do squat for performance. The point is upgradeability.

Socket 915/925 AKA the next Intel is going to be COMPLETELY PCI-express. Whether you like it, complain, kick, scream or not. You can use AGP cards on these systems, but with a pci-bus, its completely moot.
Socket 939 VIA chipset WILL have AGP & PCi-express, and you can buy one of these around quarter 3/4.

The whole point of buying an AGP card now is that it won't last you, at all. Upgrade to a new motherboard in a year? Chances are, no AGP slot. In 2 years? No chance in hell there will be an AGP slot. Will ATI and Nvidia make AGP R500/NV45? Nope.

And thats that, so think it all comes down to whether or not you can wait a few extra months for the extra security and longetivity.
 
Its not all about just the videocard performance... It can be indirectly affected by other components too.

Case in point... Turn down the input mode of your harddrive or use an old drive in PIO mode 1 (back in the old ISA days) try to play your favorite 3D games and watch the stutterfest ensue... During harddrive seeks, even ones not related to gameplay, it can eat up the entire CPU. Anyone with an early CD-burner can tell you how much the old 1X burners used to eat up the CPU, and sometimes even cause a write error on a buffer underrun when opening up notepad, lol.

It wasn't all that long ago either...

Reducing CPU utilization (by hardware accellerated ethernet, sound cards, harddrives and periperhals) has become paramount for getting the best FPS which PCI-express is designed to do. Videocard raw speed IMO has taken a backseat to reducing CPU utilization ever since the Radeon 9700.
 
There is one interesting ability that crops up with PCI-express videocards for programmers.

That being true visual based collision detection:

Imagine you are in Everquest III fighting a dragon... The other players are busy distracting it that you manage to sneak behind and cut off a chunk of its tail. When you swing your axe, the tail is chopped off in the exact place where you swung because the videocard relayed the proper information that you should have seen back to the CPU.

It looks seamlessly like you cut it off, because the videocard can communcate back to the CPU in realtime what you just saw. Instead of calculating the hit in the CPU and the excessive amount of calculation required to render every single detail as you are cutting through the tail, the videocard knows enough to render it under its own power (adding to realism too)

Or in todays games... Imagine Unreal tournament 2004, where you can use the videocard to relay the information back to the CPU that you are "dead-on" with your headshot.

As is now, its actually backward, relying on the CPU to draw to the GPU what its "assumed" hit is, even worse is when it is double or triple buffered (how in the world can you get an accurate headshot if you are always shooting three frames behind?)... Hence you need to shoot in front of a person to hit them...

PCI-E has greater potential that I think people give it credit for.
 
:confused: I had decided to go ahead and buy an Asus P4P800 E Deluxe, and it would house the Radeon 9800 I bought last October. Pop in a 2.8C along with PC3200 RAM and I'm flyin'.

I get it. Nothing to be gained in 3D gaming by waiting on PCI Express (at least, in the short-term). So, it's no big deal that my every-three-year-upgrade of my video card is not made for PCI Express (this time around). Go forward with that killer 2.8C/Asus upgrade I am describing above.

BUT,

what are the buts?

Tell me what else I will be losing by not waiting on a PCI Express motherboard. Please tell me in what way I will see a boost in performance on the PCI Express board when compared, say, to a computer like I described above. Don't mention "video-editing" because I don't do that. Also, I'm not in a hurry to swap my hard drives out for SATA-ready drives.
But instead, consider the following: I surf the internet, check email, peruse forums, play Quake, rip audio, listen to mp3s, burn audio/data cds, research for school, do word-processing, print assignments, upload pictures from the digital camera, and chat on messenger programs like msn and yahoo. That is the scope of my computer use. Which of these items will be improved noticably if I wait and build a system around a PCI Express board?

I am not bashing PCI Express, but I am trying to understand why I would want to upgrade to PCI Express IF the only way I could benefit from it is to do a COMPLETE upgrade of components that fully utilize PCI Express. And even then, would I actually be gaining anything besides "staying current"?
 
Wedge said:
:confused: I had decided to go ahead and buy an Asus P4P800 E Deluxe, and it would house the Radeon 9800 I bought last October. Pop in a 2.8C along with PC3200 RAM and I'm flyin'.

I get it. Nothing to be gained in 3D gaming by waiting on PCI Express (at least, in the short-term). So, it's no big deal that my every-three-year-upgrade of my video card is not made for PCI Express (this time around). Go forward with that killer 2.8C/Asus upgrade I am describing above.

BUT,

what are the buts?

Tell me what else I will be losing by not waiting on a PCI Express motherboard. Please tell me in what way I will see a boost in performance on the PCI Express board when compared, say, to a computer like I described above. Don't mention "video-editing" because I don't do that. Also, I'm not in a hurry to swap my hard drives out for SATA-ready drives.
But instead, consider the following: I surf the internet, check email, peruse forums, play Quake, rip audio, listen to mp3s, burn audio/data cds, research for school, do word-processing, print assignments, upload pictures from the digital camera, and chat on messenger programs like msn and yahoo. That is the scope of my computer use. Which of these items will be improved noticably if I wait and build a system around a PCI Express board?

I am not bashing PCI Express, but I am trying to understand why I would want to upgrade to PCI Express IF the only way I could benefit from it is to do a COMPLETE upgrade of components that fully utilize PCI Express. And even then, would I actually be gaining anything besides "staying current"?
Click to expand...

well, it really all depends....if you a lot of the above simultaneously, then obviously your current PCI bus will be limiting the speed at which they can be done....the PCI-e bus will have a lot more throughput, so you could benefit in that respect because the bus will not be taxed as much as with a regular PCI bus.

however, if you only do one or two of those things at once, you will probably not notice any difference between PCI and PCI-e.

Quake 3 is hardly a very taxing game anymore, with the GPU's & CPU's that are out now, and i highly doubt you will notice any difference at all between 125fps and say, 175fps....again, the PCI-e bus will probably not affect you in any usable way.

the main way that the PCI-e bus will benefit you is if you are one of the people that only upgrade their systems every 3 - 4 years. in such a case, you would probably want to get the highest-end PCI-e stuff available at the time, so that it will still serve you well a few years down the line, especially when software is being optimized for the bus and can take advantage of the bus. this is definitely a more expensive option up front, but given the fact that you would not be continuously upgrading this component or that component, it could actually be cheaper in the long run, until you are ready to build a whole new system a few years from now.

on the other hand, however, if you are the type of person who likes to upgrade to newer components every now and again, then it is not really worth it to wait for PCI-e. just get what you want now, and when something better comes out, or when the prices for components go down because of new product launches, just sell what you bought before and upgrade. if you are this type of person, it makes no sense at all to wait for ANY new technology (unless there is a specific launch date, and there are proven performance benefits displayed by the use of the technology), because you will always be waiting for the "next best thing".

there is no "right" or "wrong" answer to whether or not someone should wait or buy now, just do what makes sense to you. after all, it's all about what makes YOU happy, not what makes other people think you did or did not do the "right" thing.

and for goodness sake, do some research on stuff before you make a decision, so that you are making an informed purchase, instead of just buying the advertiser's hype, or relying on someone else's opinion on what is best for them, which may or may not be what is best for you......
 
The only reason I was thinking about waiting for a PCI-E motherboard/chipset was for upgradeability. But ATI themselves are saying that AGP cards still have a future out to 12-18 months. Thats the X800's, then the X800's refresh this fall/winter, the next gen next spring/summer, and possibly that gens refresh. Add on a year of use out of that last product cycle and any AGP board I buy today will have 2-3 years of agp card use before I may have to look at a new motherboard to support some form of new video card. Thats fine by my books.
 
xXaNaXx said:
well, it really all depends....if you a lot of the above simultaneously, then obviously your current PCI bus will be limiting the speed at which they can be done....the PCI-e bus will have a lot more throughput, so you could benefit in that respect because the bus will not be taxed as much as with a regular PCI bus.
Click to expand...


xXaNaXx,

Thanks for that input. I would like to multitask with more speed/efficiency. That's actually helpful that you put it that way. I'll research it a bit more as you suggested.

Assuming I wait until PCI Express boards are available, my next concern is bugginess/dependability, but I guess nobody knows about that until we get there.


Surly,

That's interesting that you mentioned that about ATI. It makes the whole PCI Express issue seem less of an "issue" because it implies a gradual change (for the PC gaming industry) rather than something abrupt. But, again, I'm less concerned about the gaming aspect of PCI Express and more concerned about the other features it has to offer immediately.
 
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