Dean Jarratt wrote:
You make some excellent points Benjamin, however I'm still a little
confused as to why AGP has been ditched so quickly. GPU's still can't
consume the AGP 8x bandwidth.

That's exactly the point, no AGP system ever practically used all the
available bandwidth. Even 8X. There were fundamental obstacles to
overcome in the AGP architecture that were bottlenecks to performance.
Plus, the entire system performance suffered from legacy interfaces like
PCI. PCIE provides far more total system bandwidth and the ability to
actually carry it, not just over the graphics bus.

Advances like the NForce architecture and the last KT400's were about
the best you would ever get in AGP. It seems very silly to put
something like a Athlon 64 X2 4200 in a system where both memory and
graphics performance would be limited by the system itself. There was
very little return for increasing processor and FSB speeds on AGP systems.