I guess this should go here, I just got my nice new Geforce 2 last night, and very nice it is too. (as well as a nice new Intelimouse Explorer, mmmm glow in the dark mouse...) I have a motherboard with AGP2* I believe, but the box says that the card comprehensively supports AGP4*. Does anyone know how much of a boost I would see if I was to upgrade the motherboard to AGP4*? Going from the names I would guess that in theory it should be possible to get twice the goodness out of the same card, but somehow I guess this isn''t going to be the case. How much does a AGP4* Motherboard cost anyway? Ta,

As far as I am aware, very little even pushes the limits of AGP2x, therefore virtually nothing makes much use of AGP4x. The benefits you''ll see now are minimal. Bear in mind that games are usually optimised to try and -avoid- throwing heaps of data from system->video memory, and you''ll see why. Of course, a little extra speed here and there doesn''t hurt anything, but I think the money would be better spent elsewhere if you have the choice.

I have no trouble finding things to spend money on, as my rather tatty and worn out visa card will testify. At present I think I''ll stick with what I have.

Thanks.

Well, the AGP4X affects only memory transfers over the AGP bus, it doesn''t affect the cards fillrate etc., so you won''t get a big performance boost (unless you use LOTS of textures etc.)


Regards,
Laarz

I''m no hardware buff, but I''ve been looking at GeForce2 cards myself recently, and know that AGP 4x refers to a ''quadruple rendering pipeline'' as opposed to AGP 2x being a ''dual rendering pipeline''.

The word render as I interpret it is the speed at which an image is generated, and a pipeline (again as I interpret it) is a processing facility. Therefore I deduce that an AGP 4x port would process rendering twice as fast as an AGP 2x port.

However, the speed of your entire system is not measured directly to your AGP port speed, and a new technology like AGP 4x will be the least likely to affect your performance limit (until you upgrade to a K8 BiAthlon 1.5 TeraHertz Doo-Dah, and Windows 2150 with DirectX 88.0 is punishing the AGP 2x port!).

By the way, which OEM board did you go for, and was it worth it?

Marty.

Ummm, dual and quad rendering pipline has nothing whatsoever to do with AGP speed! You can have AGP1x and still benefit from a quad rendering pipeline. All the "x" rendering pipeline stuff refers to are the number of pixels that can be simultaneously plotted by the card; a quad rendering pipeline means it can draw 4 at once, although I believe there are some specific texturing requirements for this. Check out sharkyextreme.com or anandtech.com for a better description of card features!

AGP multiples simply refer to the speed at which data moves up and down the AGP bus. Generally, AGP memory transfers are only used for loading textures into texture memory. A good GeForce 2 has 64 Mb RAM, and with current games that means little or no texture swapping during play - so AGP bus-speed is probably not all that relevant.