agp video

The Accelerated Graphics Port (also called Advanced Graphics Port, often shortened to AGP) is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a graphics card to a computer's motherboard, primarily to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics. more...

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AGP is often referred to as a 'bus', however this is a misnomer - a single AGP controller is only capable of controlling a single device. This is the main reason that almost all mainboards have only a single AGP slot, although motherboards have been built with multiple independent AGP slots. AGP is currently being phased out in favor of PCI Express.

Advantages over PCI

As computers became increasingly graphically oriented, successive generations of graphics adapters began to push the limits of the PCI bus, leading to the development of the AGP bus, dedicated to graphics adapters. Most motherboards manufactured since the late 1990s include either an on-board integrated AGP adapter, or a physical AGP slot into which a separate AGP-based graphics card can be inserted.

For the needs of modern graphics adapters, the AGP bus is superior to PCI because it provides a dedicated pathway between the slot and the processor rather than sharing the PCI bus, allowing for faster communication. AGP also uses sideband addressing, meaning that addressing for packets is carried outside of the packet, so the entire packet does not need to be read to get addressing information. In addition, to load a texture, a PCI graphics card must copy it from the system's RAM into the card's framebuffer, whereas an AGP card is capable of reading textures directly from system RAM using the Graphics Address Remapping Table (GART). GART reapportions main memory for texture storage, allowing the graphics card to access them directly.

The two main reasons graphics cards with the PCI interface are still produced is that, first, they can be used in nearly any PC; because while some motherboards with built-in graphics adapters lack an AGP slot, few, if any, modern desktop PCs do not have PCI slots. Secondly, a user with an appropriate operating system can use several PCI graphics cards (or several PCI graphics cards in combination with one AGP card) simultaneously — to give many different video outputs (for the use of many screens). This is almost impossible with AGP 1.0 (early AGP 1x and 2x) and AGP 2.0 (AGP 4x) cards, because they do not support more than one AGP Master (video card) per AGP Target (chipset interface); AGP 3.0 (AGP 8x) does support more than one AGP Master per AGP Target, but nonetheless few PC motherboards are equipped with more than one AGP slot. Some server-class computers support having multiple AGP slots in a single system: the HP AlphaServer GS1280 has up to 16 AGP slots, the AlphaServer ES80 up to 4 AGP slots, and the AlphaServer ES47 up to 2 AGP slots.

History

The AGP slot first appeared on x86 compatible system boards based on Socket 7 Pentium and Slot 1 Pentium II processors. Intel introduced AGP support with the i440LX Slot 1 chipset in mid-October 1997 and a flood of products followed from all the major system board vendors; this chipset was discontinued by Intel on December 8, 2000. The i440LX chipset included the well established PIIX4 south bridge from Intel's 430TX Socket 7 offering.

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