"In part 1 of this article, we revisit the AGP platform with some newer video cards and see how it adds up in today's performance benchmarks. "
Page 1 - Introduction
Although the video card market is nearly entirely dominated by PCI Express cards, several alternative cards still exist that do not use the PCI Express interface. These cards are based on the older AGP interface. The amount of AGP cards on the market has greatly decreased from what it stood at three years ago. Some manufacturers, though, continue to release AGP products primarily because they realize that a number of PC users still have AGP motherboards.
Whether it is an older system that still uses AGP or if the need to upgrade in the past couple of years has not arisen, there are still PC users that use AGP. When PCI Express was introduced in 2004, people who had just upgraded their systems with the latest video cards and motherboards right before the technologies’ debut saw the choice of future video card upgrades become severely limited right before their eyes. Now, with PC games becoming more demanding than ever before, upgrading from older video cards is becoming a necessity for PC gamers.
This requirement to upgrade, however, is hard to fulfill for users that still have AGP motherboards. For the most part, nearly all high-end video cards are exclusive to the PCI Express interface, meaning that the chance an AGP user has to upgrade to the latest and greatest video card is very small. The midrange segment for AGP cards, on the other hand, continues to be updated, though cards are still not abundantly available.
We have decided to begin taking a look at some AGP video cards to satisfy our readers looking to upgrade to a newer AGP video card, whether it is for an older system lying around the house or if they have recently decided to upgrade computers and want to see if there is any life left for their AGP system.
As we mentioned, certain manufacturers are still releasing midrange AGP video cards. It makes sense that manufacturers are only releasing midrange AGP video cards. This is because most users with enough money to spend on buying a high-end video card would probably buy a completely new system with the latest bells and whistles instead of upgrading to another AGP card. Today we will be looking at two AGP video cards based on the RV570 GPU: the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO and HIS Radeon X1950PRO.
Page 2 - Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO 512MB AGP
Sapphire’s AGP offering comes in the form of a single slot X1950PRO that has 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory. The GPU comes clocked at 580MHz and the memory at 700MHz (1400MHz effective).
Sapphire has chosen to use two traditional molex connectors in place of the newer 6-pin PCIe power adapter. We feel this is a smart move as most users buying this card would probably not have the latest power supply unit in their system.
The heatsink is made of aluminum and covers nearly the entire length of the board. The cooling solution is not bulky though, and thus the card ends up occupying only one slot. The card comes with two DVI outs along with a single S-Video out. The PCI Express to AGP bridge that NVIDIA uses can be seen in the above photo and is covered by a pink thermal pad for protection.
Page 3 - HIS X1950 PRO IceQ3 Turbo 256 MB AGP
HIS sells two versions of the X1950PRO AGP. One version retails with 256MB of onboard memory while the other has 512MB. The version we were sent by HIS had 256MB of memory. Although our sample had a smaller amount of onboard memory than the Sapphire offering, all versions of the HIS X1950 PRO IceQ3 come factory overclocked, evening out the playing field between the two cards. The GPU operates at 620MHz, 40MHz faster the 580MHz of the ATI reference speeds, and the memory operates at 1.48GHz compared to the reference 1.4GHz.
HIS did not give much importance to reducing the thickness of its card during the design stage, and thus it ends up occupying two slots. The cooling solution is made of a semi-transparent plastic that is slightly blue and gives a frosty appearance. Additional power is provided to the card through a 6-pin PCIe power adaptor.
Page 4 - Test Configuration
A lot has changed since AGP cards ruled the graphics market; DDR2 wrestled its way to the top as the new memory standard, NVIDIA released a handful of new chipsets, and Intel and AMD both came out with new platforms and processors. To effectively make the comparison between PCI Express and AGP as accurate as possible, we chose to use components with the smallest generation gap. The end result was two completely different test systems; one for PCI Express and another for AGP.
PCI Express Platform
motherboard: ASUS A8N32-SLI (chipset nVIDIA nForce 4 SLI, Socket 939)
The two AGP cards perform nearly identical to each other in the 3D Mark fill rate test. The preceding situation is repeated by the PCI Express X1950 cards, but there still are light performance differences that are a result of the different clock frequencies. The pixel shader test heavily favors the Sapphire offering, most likely because of its large 512MB onboard memory.
The vertex shader and pixel shader tests show a general trend we have been seeing throughout the tests on this page. The Sapphire card performs the best due to its larger onboard memory size of 512MB. In the case of these tests the memory size makes a much larger difference than the interface.
Page 6 - F.E.A.R.
Our version of F.E.A.R. was patched to 1.08, and we tested at resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with anti-aliasing at 4x with anisotropic filtering set at 16x in one test or soft shadows enabled in the other.
All X1950 cards, regardless of whether they use PCI Express or AGP, have nearly identical performance. It is also interesting to see the performance of the older generation video cards and how it compares to the newer generation AGP cards.
With soft shadows enabled, the HIS X1950PRO tops our chart. For the most part, though, performance mirrors the first F.E.A.R. test on this page with all X1950PRO cards performing very similar to each other. It is also interesting to see how older generation cards, such as the 9800XT, can barely even run the game with soft shadows enabled, even at lower resolutions as 1024x768.
Page 7 - Oblivion and Final Words
Oblivion undoubtedly is one of the most stressing game titles of 2006 and can effectively stress every component in a system. Indeed, since the game provides a decent challenge to even the most high-end of cards, we were eager to see how it would perform with the older AGP interface and cards.
The test lasted for a total of 30 seconds. Our game was patched to version 1.1 in Italian, and we placed all quality settings at the highest possible, save for HDR which we left disabled. We ran tests at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16x anisotropic filtering.
Unfortunately Oblivion created a problem for us in our testing because the game doesn’t come with a built-in benchmarking utility. This means we had to resort to using FRAPS, which made it much harder to maintain consistency between tests. We attempted to recreate the same test on each card exactly the same way; however, there might have been slight differences from card to card.
Again, we see a continuation of the pattern we’ve been seeing where the X1950PRO cards all perform very similar to each other. The margin of difference between the cards is very slight, and for the most part negligible. This means that both AGP and PCI Express versions of the X1950PRO perform practically the same as each other.
Increasing the resolution places more emphasis on memory size and it is only natural to see the 512MB Sapphire X1950PRO AGP top our charts. Right behind the importance of memory for high resolutions comes clock speed, and so naturally the factory overclocked HIS Radeon X1950PRO AGP came in second, topping out all PCI Express counterparts.
Final Words
What we’ve been seeing so far in our tests is quite interesting. For the most part, the Sapphire X1950PRO 512MB AGP has been dominating the results, and is offering quite solid performance. From what we have been seeing, the use of PCI Express isn’t making much of a performance difference so far. We still admit, though, that the number of benchmarks in the first part of this article isn’t enough to effectively draw a conclusion. Part two of this article, which will be published tomorrow, will include additional tests including Half Life 2 Episode 1/Lost Coast, Prey, X3 Reunion, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Serious Sam 2, noise, temperature, and power tests. We will also state our complete observations then.
