Whats so special about AGP?
Besides using a separate bus and thus not taxing the PCI bus as heavily, AGP has the unique advantage of being able to share system memory when needed. Applications, particularly games, have been limited to using texture maps of less than 4MB in size because that’s all the memory available for creating such textures with an 8MB non-AGP card. Texture maps include such things as the patterns that make a surface look like a stone wall. When an AGP graphics card needs to render large textures, it “borrows” the memory it requires from system memory, returning it to the system when it’s no longer needed. More complex textures tend to strangle the PCI bus, so having a separate bus is a plus. Intel is promoting AGP as a solution for arcade-quality games, 3D modeling, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and other graphics-intensive applications.
