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.