What does AGP mean in your computer?

The AGP (Accelerated Graphic Ports or Advanced Graphic Ports) is the currently obsolete graphics system interface. This technology began more than 14 years ago, when the 3D graphics acceleration technology became popular and rapidly popularized, in order to make the data transmission between the system and graphics accelerator card higher than the PCI bus bandwidth, the emergence of AGP.

AGP vs pci--in theory the fundamental difference between AGP and PCI is that the AGP is a "port", which means that it can only be connected to one terminal and that the terminal must be a graphics accelerator card. PCI is a bus, it can connect many different kinds of terminals, can be a video card, can also be a network card or SCSI card, as well as a sound card, and so on. All of these different terminals must share the PCI bus and its bandwidth, while the AGP provides the graphics accelerator with a direct line to the chipset, from where it can lead to CPU, system memory, or PCI bus.

The average PCI bus data width is 32 bits (bit), running at 33MHz, so that the maximum bandwidth it can provide is 4byte/sx33mhz=133mb/s. Although the new PCI64/66 specification provides a 64-bit data width and a 66MHz working frequency, the bandwidth is 533mb/s, but it is designed for I/O controllers that require very high data bandwidth, such as IEEE1394 or gigabit NICs, with little support at the moment. The AGP is also a 32-bit data width, but its working frequency starts at 66MHz, so that the usual way to use the descent of each clock cycle to provide 266mb/s bandwidth, and AGP2X, through the simultaneous use of the clock cycle of the ascent and descent along the transmission data, agp1x Can achieve 533mb/s bandwidth, compared to the new agp4x is to increase the bandwidth to the 1066MB/S, and the latest agp8x to increase the bandwidth to the 2.12gb/s!