Dean Jarratt schrieb:

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.

No, AGP 4x would be still fast enough...

It all seems a bit pushy by the developers to move everyone for monetary
purposes. It almost seems like hardware developers are thinking that AGP
was too good to begin with and has held back money making opportunities.

You ignore that unlike AGP PCIe is not only for gfx cards. The problem
with AGP PCs is not the gfx interface (AGP) but the slow shared bus
(PCI) which is needed for expension boards. PCI _is_ a limiting factor
already, and the PCI enhancements (PCI64, PCI-X) have a higher bandwidth
but still suffer from the same problem (shared bus). So there was a need
for something really new, even when most home users didn't reach the limits.

Unlike AGP (which basically is just a faster PCI interface) and PCI
which both are parallel busses PCIe is a serial point-to-point
connection with accumulated bandwidth (which means you can combine
several lanes to increase bandwidth). That means PCIe devices don't have
to share bandwidth with other devices. Of course this also has
advantages to gfx cards while AGP is a single card system only which
also has several limitations and bottlenecks.

So it's clear that at some point simply a cut was necessary because the
limitations through PCI weren't getting better over time...

And honestly, I see no problem. Of course the majority of old systems
are AGP but what do you expect? It's not a PCIe specific problem that
doing an upgrade often comes with the need for upgrading other
components. Want examples? CPU too slow - new CPU has new socket or
different FSB - new mobo that supports CPU. Oops, the new mobo also
wants new RAM because the old RAM is too slow or also from a different
type (i.e. SDRAM). So that means buying new RAM, too. And after You're
done with that you probably find that the HD also is slow and that it's
better if the new disk you gonna buy doesn't has parallel ATA but SATA
because your new mobo has two or four ports waiting for a fast drive.
And so on...

I know that lots of people are upset because AGP is dead. But then, the
AGP cards that are still available (ATI X800 class or GF6800 series) are
more than fast enough even for the fastest AGP systems. Cards like the
7800GTX or ATI X1800 also want a system that has a fast CPU and also a
fast bus system (i.e. memory interface), otherwise most of the potential
of these cards is just wasted as is the money that has been spent for
them. And for people that have an older computer from i.e. the Athlon XP
generation or a socket 478 P4 every upgrade would also mean new mobo
which should be PCIe...

Benjamin