Pirate's Moon problems.

[eaterofpies]

people want pci cards as some manufacturers still dont ship pcs with AGP / PCI-E slots (such as dell) also people want pci cards for secondary cards.

decent depends on your definition of decent.

[FlatFoot]

Well my definition of 'decent' depends on how much memory is on the card and there seem to be plenty out there with 256 Megs. That's not a lot by the latest standards but for PCI video cards that's 'decent.'

Yes if manufacturers like Dell are still trying to save a few (and I mean literally a few) bucks here and there by continuing to leave out AGP or PCI-E slots then perhaps these cards will be around a little while longer.

[whatadog]

It's my understanding that agp is more of a direct link, where pci is a indirect link. So agp is faster then pci. But I could (and often so) be wrong in my logic.

[eaterofpies]

agp 1x freed the pci bus so that the graphics card didnt have to wait for it to be clear to do other things but otherwise was the same speed as the pci bus. agp 8x was 8 x the speed of the pci bus. The agp slot is also capable of providing more power than the pci bus so you can power more transistors and get more graphics calculations done onboard.

PCI express 16x is approximately the speed of the agp 8x bus but reflects the current bottlenecks in the system (the graphics cards) as opposed to the bottlenecks when agp was first used (bus bandwidth and contention). as pci express is a proper bus which can have multiple devices connected to it (agp could only have one) you can use multiple cards to render a scene.

as the later agp cards were using too much power to draw it directly from the motherboard so used the standard pc power connectors. the pci express specification includes a special power connector to get power direct from the power supply.

Very few games currently use all of the video ram on a 256 meg card even at the highest detail level (though this isnt as true as it was a couple of years ago) and you will probably not be able to run any game that requires 256 meg of video ram at the detail level required to use all of that ram. The bottleneck on a pci card is deffinitely the speed of the pci bus (and the fact that its contended meaning you cant use all of the bandwidth as you need to have sound etc).

in short a PCI card will be significantly slower than any current agp / pcie cards which is great if you want to play games like mechwarrior 3.

[FlatFoot]

To add to what EOP says...

There are certain systems out there that have motherboards without AGP card slots. These are usually systems intended for 'non-gamer' use and presumably leaving out the AGP card slot saves one or two dollars in the base manufacture of the motherboards.

Still others (like my Dell Dimension 2400) have a place on the motherboard for an AGP card slot and even have the cutout markings for the slot but still aren't provided with it.

Systems like these need good PCI video cards to play games well that are even close to modern. This works with other apps, too. WinXP's Screen Magnifier ran incredibly slowly on this system of mine using the onboard Intel video chip. I got the ATI PCI card, slammed it into the slot and now Magnifier runs at the more 'real-time magnification' speed that I need to make it worth using.


It's all a good thing in a way, though. As long as there are systems being produced without AGP or PCI-E slots there'll be a need for PCI video cards. This is good for everyone out there with older computers that need updating.

[the_random_man]

i have two PC running ATi cards, one a 9200SE the other X550. i have no problems with MW3 and they are both pretty cr*p cards.