X-bit labs

Last days of AGP Bus.

Category: Video

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/04/2008 | 04:15 PM ]

While AMD calls for its partners not to give up the support of formerly popular AGP 8x graphics interface, Nvidia sticks to completely different strategy. Now you can still find latest generation AGP graphics cards on ATI Radeon chips, while Nvidia fans with outdated platforms have to be happy with GeForce 7 series solutions only. Moreover, there will be no new AGP 8x graphics cards on Nvidia chips, according to the company officials.

Sapphire Company has recently started shipping Radeon HD 3850 graphics cards with AGP 8x interface. These graphics solutions have proven quite successful: they can really speed up the gaming performance of older platforms. And although there are only Windows XP drivers available these days, AMD promises to release Windows Vista drivers, too. So, AMD that has been focusing mostly on mainstream and essential segments lately strengthens its positions among the older platforms owners.

At the same time, we haven’t seen any Nvidia GeForce 8XXX based graphics cards designed for AGP 8x interface. It turned out that the problem lies with the latest AGP-PCI BR02 (HIS) bridge revision that cannot work with the new graphics chips. It was supposed before that Nvidia will still release a new A05 revision of their BR02 bridge that will be compatible with contemporary GPUs, thus giving their partners the opportunity to refresh the lineup for the AGP interface. However we learned now, that Nvidia gave up this idea.

So, we will see no new graphics cards from Nvidia with AGP 8x interface. Nvidia explained their decision by absence of sufficient demand for solutions like that.