PCI Express means death of AGP standard!

[Guest Blueshockeynut]

A little PC news for everyone, something you might want to follow in the coming months:A panel of Intel specialists working on the PC Express specifications confirmed today that when products are released it means the death of the AGPx spec, with rev eight being the last. While PCI Express means X16 next generation graphics delivering 4GBs per second per direction, that may mean that when Nvidia releases its PCI Express card, you'll have to buy a whole new PC to plug it into.PCI Express products are due to ship in the second half of next year, with other radical changes happening in the notebook and server segments too. The specs are far advanced and Microsoft is very likely to take full advantage of some of its new futures, probably with Longhorn.Bala Cadambi, who heads up the PCI Express initiative, said that the new specification will run fine with existing BIOSes and drivers, and software, but it has "a lot of features software can take advantage of". Those include isochronous support for streaming media for TV tuners, for graphics and for cameras.Something to look for in the future.JN

[Guest]

Interesting.....I'm glad to see anything that improves speed and throughput on the graphics front. Real-time high-resolution ray-tracing is getting closer all the time.

[JimmiG 244]

Interesting. However I don't think AGP will die that quickly. When we moved from PCI to AGP graphics cards, both PCI and AGP versions of the same cards were released for quite some time (even the venerable Voodoo5 came in two flavours). Eventually, high-end cards started comming in only AGP form, while budget cards weere still available as PCI. Now even budget cards have moved to thew AGP standard. The same will probably happen with this standard.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

This is really appropriate to the Hardware forum. Please move it over there.