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More Graphics card talk..

RitualOfTheTrout - Apr 15, 2004

		RitualOfTheTrout	Apr 15, 2004
		Ok, iv been looking at the radeon 9800 series. All of them are AGP 8X and main board only takes AGP 4x. First im pretty sure that an 8x card can run in a 4x slot, it will just operate slower.. Now.. how much would this affect the card? And when you turn on anti aliasing and other things that make the image better, do these things rely on the speed of the card? I have an old radeon 7000 i picked up for 30 bucks awhile back and when i turn it on to best settings everything gets real slow, if its a better card will this still happen? Im hoping that once the new generation of ati cards come out the 9800 series will drop in price.

		it290	Apr 15, 2004
		Well, yes and no. AGP speed shouldn't really affect things like anisotropic filtering or antialiasing, but it does affect the speed that textures can be loaded to the card, which can have a detrimental effect on performance. Of course, the amount of horsepower the card has will still play a role; turning on those features will always slow things down, but the more powerful the card, the less it'll matter. The 9800 is very good at handling FSAA and anisotropic filtering.

		Curtis	Apr 15, 2004
		Originally posted by it290@Apr 15, 2004 @ 11:48 AM ...but it does affect the speed that textures can be loaded to the card, which can have a detrimental effect on performance... Most benchmarks show that the performance difference between 8x and 4x is about 1-2%. So long as the card you get isn't AGP Pro, it should run perfectly well in your 4x slot.

		Alexvrb	Apr 15, 2004
		Originally posted by Curtis+Apr 15, 2004 @ 11:56 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Curtis @ Apr 15, 2004 @ 11:56 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-it290@Apr 15, 2004 @ 11:48 AM ...but it does affect the speed that textures can be loaded to the card, which can have a detrimental effect on performance... Most benchmarks show that the performance difference between 8x and 4x is about 1-2%. So long as the card you get isn't AGP Pro, it should run perfectly well in your 4x slot. [/b][/quote] That is correct. The extra speed is only needed when loading textures - once they are already loaded, it runs just as fast.

		gameboy900	Apr 15, 2004
		Keep in mind that as new games come out now more and more will use more textures then the normal 128MB of ram on the card can hold. When this happens (and it will) you will begin to notice performance drops as the card has to wait that much longer for the textures to get to it. Games comming out now are already hitting the 128MB mark and some are going over in some cases. Just something to keep in mind. Also a 256MB card will eventually experience this issue too...but this won't be for at least 2 years if not more.

		Tagrineth	Apr 17, 2004
		AGP 8x will never reach that point. Even in UT2004, AGP 8x makes little to no difference, and UT2004 is using the highest texture size and detail levels modern cards are capable of supporting. It MIGHT make a difference in apps that use a lot of different pixel or vertex programmes, but those will invariably be so slow anyway that it doesn't matter at all.

		Alexvrb	Apr 18, 2004
		It's more important that they're widening the upstream on GPUs with PCI Express, because that allows them to handle acceleration of more stuff, like realtime video editing. But as far as pure gaming goes, it doesn't really matter. There are also a couple of things that can stretch your GPU memory budget. One is compressed textures, and the other is avoiding high res textures - typically games allow you to turn it down a bit, if you ever need to. Basically, by the time he needs more VRAM, his card will be outdated anyway.