Lovers of high-end PC graphics rejoiced at news of the recent launch of desktops with PCI Express-based chip sets that promise dramatically faster graphics throughput than today’s AGP 8X standard. But a preliminary look at two of the first PCI Express cards suggests that the spec will have more impact on future graphics headroom than on immediate performance gains.
In fact, our tests showed practically no performance difference between graphics cards using the AGP 8X interface and those using PCI Express. Though PCI Express 16X supports concurrent transfers of up to 4 gigabytes per second compared with AGP 8X’s 2.1 GBps of shared bandwidth, even today’s most graphics-intensive PC games have yet to turn the AGP conduit into a bottleneck. We tested boards based on graphics chips from NVidia and from ATI. NVidia sent us an early PCI Express reference board using its GeForce 6800 GT chip and 256MB of memory; ATI provided a preproduction version of its board using the Radeon X600 XT chip and 128MB of memory. Retail cards based on the NVidia GeForce 6800 GT chip should be shipping by the time you read this and will sell for about $399. Cards based on ATI’s Radeon X600 XT chip should be on shelves, too, selling for about $199.
Source: PCWorld
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