PCI Express May not be all it is cracked up to be, yet.

[Maveric169]

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,117070,tk,prx,00.asp

 

[Luna]

Ok, maybe I am off on this, but the current games can't even fill up AGP 8x Bandwidth (maybe Doom 3 can, but I'm not sure), so why would you expect a FPS boost at this point in time anyway with those games?

It's like stating the obvious.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong though.

 

[LeeJend]

The bottle neck is in the number of pixel pipelines on the cards and onboard memory. The bandwidth into the MB slot is not a factor in FPS.

For more FPS in texture heavy games like Doom3 or ut2004 you need more or faster pipelines and plenty of onboard fast RAM.

The current video cards are running about AGP 4X speed to the MB. Try it yourself. Set your agp to 4x on the vid card and in bios then run a benchmark. Repeat with both at 8x. Results will be close or the same.

 

[dreamliner77]

Read that article in PCWorld last night. It was a waste of time.

 

[Maveric169]

Read that article in PCWorld last night. It was a waste of time.

I am not sure why you felt it was a waste of time. Every article I have read thus far on PCI-X was that it was going to revolutionize the video interface, be 10X fast than AGP. etc, etc. When as it appears, that is not the reality.

According to the tests PCWorld did (yea, not the best source agreed) it clearly showed that to go run out and upgrade your rig at a cost of $400+ to use PCI-X technology is not justified, and all the hype about PCI-X is just that, hype, for now.

Throughput is throughput, no matter how you look at it. And after seeing the results of this test (granted it is the first) it is telling me that PCI-X is going to be just a new I/O platform, like the 939 socket will be for AMD processors.

Now this, IMO, could just show that current technology in mobo and chipset develpoment hasn't achieved a level to fully use the optimizations available with PCI-X. I mean 1-2fps on the most demading game on the market, Doom3, tells me AGP is not the problem.

 

[dreamliner77]

PCI Express will be faster, when it is actually implented correctly. The cards are basically just AGP technology with a new buss.

You must've thought that ISA was good enough when PCI hit the scene

 

[Maveric169]

PCI Express will be faster, when it is actually implented correctly. The cards are basically just AGP technology with a new buss.

You must've thought that ISA was good enough when PCI hit the scene

There was a major improvment right from the start when PCI hit the scene, if you recall, over ISA.
Using PCI, a computer can support both new PCI cards while continuing to support ISA expansion cards. PCI is designed to be synchronized with the clock speed of the microprocessor. PCI transmits 32 bits at a time in a 124-pin connection and 64 bits in a 188-pin connection in an expanded implementation. PCI uses all active paths to transmit both address and data signals, sending the address on one clock cycle and data on the next.

While ISA allows 16 bits at a time to flow between the motherboard circuitry and an expansion slot card and its associated device(s).

The greatest showing of these marked improvments was in modems and sound cards. With PCI you now can have full 32 bit and full 64bit sound that was not previously available (due to ISA's 16bit architecture) at a quality level even worth having. While many souces attempted to simulate 32 bit sound by TDM of the 16bit sound source in never really worked very well.

The tech upgrade from ISA to PCI yeilded instant results, yet with AGP to PCI-X the result so far, is showing minimal at best.

Now it does come down to, Is the test just premature? Or is it that current Mobo technology just hasn't been developed enough to use the new technology? Or is there going to be an actual application in video graphics that can/will benifit from it?

I guess what I am trying to get at is, Is there a need for PCI-X, or will there be a need for it? And what will it take to get PCI-X to the point where it really does make the difference over AGP?