Diamond Multimedia: AGP

There's a lot of talk about AGP. Is it the graphics bus of the future? Is it as fast as some people say? Do you have to be a game player to take advantage of it?

Here you will find answers to your questions to help you make the best graphics decision for your needs. Read on to find out more about the many benefits AGP provides for gaming, business applications and professional graphics.

What is AGP?

AGP for Games Enthusiasts

AGP for the Business User

AGP for the Professional

Diamond's AGP Products

Intel's AGP Homepage

What is AGP?

The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is a new technology developed by Intel for Pentium II based systems. It is designed to improve some of the essential processing tasks associated with 3D graphics. AGP is a dedicated graphics port, which means that it is separate from the existing PCI bus most users are familiar with. Having a dedicated graphics port does a number of things to improve overall system performance:

The graphics board doesn't have to contend with other PCI devices.
Removing a bandwidth hungry 3D graphics board from PCI also frees that bus to adopt other bandwidth hungry devices.

One of the key benefits of AGP is that it allows textures used in 3D graphics applications to be accessed directly from system memory. This allows the use of more complex, richer, and bigger textures to be used across the high-performance AGP port to deliver sharper, more realistic, and faster renderings of 3D images. It's sounds simple, but there are some complex feats of engineering involved, and you need a pretty savvy graphics board to take advantage of all the benefits AGP has to offer.