Thread: What Graphics Card Is Good For An AGP 4x Slot?

A GeForce 6600GT might be something else to consider as it may be just as cheap and can handle stuff like FEAR at medium detail settings just fine.

Err ... well it's now too late to be helpful to Hunter but just out of curiosity I have some questions. First, when a card says it supports some older standard, doesn't that mean that it "supports" it at less-than-optimal performance? Like this example of a 6600LE... won't it give results that aren't as good on AGP 4x as it would if u plugged it into AGP 8x? And furthermore, I was looking through all the 6-series nvidia cards, and most of the 6600's are PCI-e. So are those that are PCI-e better than the 8x/4x example I linked? Even though they are the same model of card (6600)? I'm honestly rather unknowledgeable about video cards... and nvidia's cards are especially confusing... I'd really like to get a better grip on these things.

LE's are basically the midgets cut off at the knees when it comes to video cards.

AGP variants of a card are just that: variants. There is a slight hit with cards using a PCIe to AGP bridge chips, which any GeForce 6 series does (and anything later will too), but not anything you're going to notice without a benchmark between two otherwise equivalent systems. AGP 8x cards are AGP 4x compatible, as per the AGP 3.0 spec.

PCIe to AGP bridge chips?

So what's the point of making AGP 8x if it's the same thing as an AGP 4x?? 8x is supposed to be twice as fast but u say 8x cards are "compatible" with 4x ... so the extra twice the bandwidth is useless?

I think you misunderstood me. Physically and electrically, AGP 8x is compatible with the 4x/1.5V AGP 2.0 standard. The 1x/2x/4x/8x (66MHz) rating is the indicator of the maximum throughput. AGP 8x offers more bandwidth over AGP 4x. It's not as accurate to say it's faster. AGP 8x would be useless for a GeForce 4 MX, but it's fine for a Radeon 9800XT. Both are easily used in AGP 4x and 8x formats, yet the Radeon is actually able to make use of the greater bandwidth. I doubt the GF4 MX would make use of anything past AGP 2x, given that it's a GeForce 2 MX with faster clock speeds.

These days, nVidia and ATi are designing their graphics chips with a PCIe interface in mind, which is serial in nature. AGP, which is a faster PCI bus set aside for video cards, is paralles in nature, just like PCI. There has to be some translating in there somehow. They don't have to go ahead and redesign an entire GPU for two interfaces. They have a bridge chip that is added to the video card design when made for AGP. AGP 8x is the fastest standard you will see. PCIe has just gotten started and a new 2.0 spec is undergoing some fine tuning before being officially published.