AfterDawn: Glossary

AGP standards for Accelerated Graphics Port or Advanced Graphics Port. The high-speed interface has been in use for years, and was developed for motherboards to attach graphics cards and assist in 3D graphics acceleration. While the AGP port provided significant improvements when it was brought to the market (over PCI), it is currently being largely phased out for the PCI-Express (PCI-e) interface. Regardless, motherboards and graphics cards still are available that use the AGP standard.



Click here to view GFX cards that use the AGP interface.

Since it was first published by Intel in 1997 (spec. 1.0), it has evolved considerably. Speeds of 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x have been specified over spec. v2.0 and spec. v3.0 with maximum data rates of 266MB/s (1x), 533MB/s (2x), 1066MB/s (4x) and 2133MB/s (8x). Compared to the data rate of PCI (133MB/s) it is not hard to understand why AGP is a considerable improvement. In addition to the official variations of AGP, several unofficial variations exist, such as a version that is based on a 64-bit channel instead of a 32-bit channel. It is used in high-performance graphics cards.