K wrote:

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 23:28:26 +0000, teqguy wrote:



Because most well known manufacturers will eventually stop carrying
AGP cards all together.


Eventually, yes, but AGP will be with us well into next year. DDR2
will replace DDR1. Socket 939 will replace socket 940, Socket T will
replace Socket 728, BTX will eventually replace ATX, the list goes on
in the never ending upgrade cycle.



Having one version of a product cuts down on confusion and returns,
which helps both consumers and retail sales.

Absolutely, and I'm sure that the likes of ATI and Nvidia as
well as the motherboard makers will push us to PCI Express as soon as
they can. But it would be suicide for one of them to bring out a new
card and only cater for those who are prepared to buy new
motherboards. It's just the poster I replied to implied that there
would be an immediate need to replace your motherboard, which is
clearly not the case.

I have a gut feeling that PCI Express will do very little for
performance, just like AGP before it. Nothing can substitute lots of
fast RAM on the videocard to prevent shipping textures across to the
much slower system RAM. You could have the fastest interface
imaginable for your vid card; it would do little to make up for the
bottleneck that is your main memory.


K






Current high end graphics cards do very little with an AGP 4x bus, let
alone an 8x bus.



The best possible optimization that could ever be made, would be to
start manufacturing motherboards with sockets for a GPU and either
sockets or slots for video memory.


This would allow for motherboards to potentially reduce in size, while
increasing in performance and upgradability.


The price would increase, but it would be worth it.