PCI-Express SLOWER or same as AGP 8X @Anandtech

We might not need PCI express for graphics yet, but I regular PCI is kind of maxed out in certain aplications. Nvidia can't build a card around its soundstorm dolby encoder because of bandwidth limitations - it has to be built around a hypertransport southbridge. Alienware's dual-vid card system looks fairly promising. Rumor has it that the graphics chips makers will pressure mobo manufacturers to make similiar products. I hear that you can use two mismatched cards from different vendors and it simply scales the amount of the picture that each one draws. Pretty nifty.
 
Very interesting JScottie, If that was true then we can have ATI and Nvidia cards in our computer at the same time producting images (if i am reading correctly) far better with both cards instead of one.
 
Did you guys ever stop and think maybe its just an issue with the beta PCI Express drivers? Most likely if anything its just a driver issue. Especially since both cards performed badly and the X800 PCI Express version is native while the 6800 uses a bridge.
 
burningrave101 said:
Did you guys ever stop and think maybe its just an issue with the beta PCI Express drivers? Most likely if anything its just a driver issue. Especially since both cards performed badly and the X800 PCI Express version is native while the 6800 uses a bridge.
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Or, as more thoroughly demonstrated here, we have yet to see even partial saturation of an AGP 8X bus with even today's power-house graphics cards. . . so exactly what is the utility of PCI-E?

Not that I mind them doing it. It's a good design. Better and simpler than AGP. I may in fact bring motherboard prices down when PCI-E is mainstream.

H
 
Well, it's not like PCI-E is remotely important right now. That's like people complaining about their ATA bandwith.

You can still play almost (if not all) games on a standard PCI slot with a PCI card. I recently changed to my Radeon 9800PRO and when I had my 7800PCI, everything ran with atleast 30fps.
 
I think most people were expecting high-end gaming to be about the same speed in todays games. Its not a bandwidth issue as long as you can fit all the textures inside the onboard video memory (and 128MB to 256MB high end cards more than fulfill this need for every game that exists today.)

The real story will be the low and mid-end cards with 64MB or less when they attempt to run games that utilize more than 128MB (and next year 256MB, and years after that probably 1GB) The new PCI-Express cards like the Radeon X300 and X600 should start to see benefit over its AGP counterparts in those situations.

It does open the door for programmers to go all out and create worlds with as big and complex of textures as they need. No longer confined to 32, 64 (last year) 128MB (this year) to get at least half decent performance and visual quality.

AGP has had a weird side-effect on hardware, that being the memory is FASTER on the videocard than it is on the motherboard... Which has also incredibly inflated prices on AGP videocards as of late (1000 Mhz DDR3 is not cheap)
 
Im not so sure PCI-e will be an improvement for its life as a slot.

If the new cards are bottle necked at the CPU, then apparently AGP also is cpu bottle necked, and will be for some time to come. If AGP isnt the bottleneck and the cpu is, then what good will pci express do? All those whiz bang features wont help until we hit suffcient clock speeds, probably 5+ GHZ.(wild guess, maybe more?) Sure, you can send data both ways, but how is that going to help if the processor is still the bottle neck?

AGP by IT standards is getting old, but apparently still isnt fully being utilized. (And to be honest, i dont see any signs of it being an issue for a good time to come)

My logic is just that if cards are held back by the CPU, then that should hold true no matter the speed of the slot.

I dont see onboard memory as being an issue either.

It has a suppossed cost benefit, and again, i dont think we'll see that either for a good time to come.
 
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