There has been a lot of speculation as to when PCI Express (PCIe) will finally take over AGP for good. Even though there isn’t any performance difference between the two standards, PCIe is the standard of the future where game developers and GPU makers should be able to work on to bring in more realistic, and GPU intensive games with elevated bandwidth requirements to everyone’s personal setups. This is what we (as users) wanted, and this is where the industry is headed. Sooner or later AGP was bound to disappear, but how soon? We may have gotten a speculative and educated answer from an industry insider.
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]According to a reply we received, our source claimed that AGP may very well disappear by the end of 2005. Clearly, it won’t disappear completely, but the market will be much less welcoming to the AGP standard. Intel gave up on AGP when it launched its i915/i925 chipsets in early 2004. Till then, AMD was the only done holding onto AGP, but with NVIDIA’s latest nForce4 chipsets even AMD has abandoned the mature standard that was never fully utilized, at least bandwidth wise. [/font]
In a recent conversation with an insider, the decision to make AGP disappear or continue it is dependant on ATI, NVIDIA and customers. If users are willing to purchase the AGP cards, graphics card manufacturers will have no choice but to deliver. But when ATI and NVIDIA get involved, the transition from AGP to PCIe will be much faster. Both GPU makers permitted a glimpse of the future between two standards with ATI’s exclusive PCIe cards only. ATI and NVIDIA even bridged some of their cards to port to AGP because the market demanded it. You can see how they originally planned to stay only with PCIe, but had to bend backwards when customers demanded AGP versions. Besides, AGP platforms (Intel’s i875/i865 and socket 754) are still selling like hot cakes, which is what has kept the AGP demand up for quite sometime. But, as prices fall on the latest platforms and AMD moves to PCIe, it’s highly possible that ATI and NVIDIA will get more aggressive with the transition and work on moving completely to PCIe, the source reported.
We are not sure if ATI and NVIDIA will offer an AGP version to their next generation of cards, but the demand for AGP will be much lower than it currently is. On the other hand, both GPU makers could possibly introduce an AGP version to their PCIe versions, but they won’t be expecting too many sales. Intel already has large OEM manufacturers on their side that have adopted PCIe as the standard of the future. As more chipsets for AMD enter the market, AMD’s OEM partners will also move to this market as soon as they possibly can. So, there’s almost 98 percent of the market favoring PCIe. What’s left is the two percent of the enthusiast crowd who may still look for value with AGP. Will the GPU makers alter their plans just because of the two percent enthusiast population? Maybe, maybe not. Until the new products are launched, all we can do is wait and see where the industry heads by the year-end, but one thing seems to be fairly certain and that is the fact that AGP will fade away rapidly throughout this year and definitely towards the beginning of 2006.
Source: CoolTechZone
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]According to a reply we received, our source claimed that AGP may very well disappear by the end of 2005. Clearly, it won’t disappear completely, but the market will be much less welcoming to the AGP standard. Intel gave up on AGP when it launched its i915/i925 chipsets in early 2004. Till then, AMD was the only done holding onto AGP, but with NVIDIA’s latest nForce4 chipsets even AMD has abandoned the mature standard that was never fully utilized, at least bandwidth wise. [/font]
In a recent conversation with an insider, the decision to make AGP disappear or continue it is dependant on ATI, NVIDIA and customers. If users are willing to purchase the AGP cards, graphics card manufacturers will have no choice but to deliver. But when ATI and NVIDIA get involved, the transition from AGP to PCIe will be much faster. Both GPU makers permitted a glimpse of the future between two standards with ATI’s exclusive PCIe cards only. ATI and NVIDIA even bridged some of their cards to port to AGP because the market demanded it. You can see how they originally planned to stay only with PCIe, but had to bend backwards when customers demanded AGP versions. Besides, AGP platforms (Intel’s i875/i865 and socket 754) are still selling like hot cakes, which is what has kept the AGP demand up for quite sometime. But, as prices fall on the latest platforms and AMD moves to PCIe, it’s highly possible that ATI and NVIDIA will get more aggressive with the transition and work on moving completely to PCIe, the source reported.
We are not sure if ATI and NVIDIA will offer an AGP version to their next generation of cards, but the demand for AGP will be much lower than it currently is. On the other hand, both GPU makers could possibly introduce an AGP version to their PCIe versions, but they won’t be expecting too many sales. Intel already has large OEM manufacturers on their side that have adopted PCIe as the standard of the future. As more chipsets for AMD enter the market, AMD’s OEM partners will also move to this market as soon as they possibly can. So, there’s almost 98 percent of the market favoring PCIe. What’s left is the two percent of the enthusiast crowd who may still look for value with AGP. Will the GPU makers alter their plans just because of the two percent enthusiast population? Maybe, maybe not. Until the new products are launched, all we can do is wait and see where the industry heads by the year-end, but one thing seems to be fairly certain and that is the fact that AGP will fade away rapidly throughout this year and definitely towards the beginning of 2006.
Source: CoolTechZone
