The End Of Agp

[mikex]

There has been a lot of speculation as to when PCI Express (PCIe) will finally take over AGP for good. Even though there isn’t any performance difference between the two standards, PCIe is the standard of the future where game developers and GPU makers should be able to work on to bring in more realistic, and GPU intensive games with elevated bandwidth requirements to everyone’s personal setups. This is what we (as users) wanted, and this is where the industry is headed. Sooner or later AGP was bound to disappear, but how soon? We may have gotten a speculative and educated answer from an industry insider.

According to a reply we received, our source claimed that AGP may very well disappear by the end of 2005. Clearly, it won’t disappear completely, but the market will be much less welcoming to the AGP standard. Intel gave up on AGP when it launched its i915/i925 chipsets in early 2004. Till then, AMD was the only done holding onto AGP, but with NVIDIA’s latest nForce4 chipsets even AMD has abandoned the mature standard that was never fully utilized, at least bandwidth wise.

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