LOSTCIRCUITS

SLI is the latest buzz in the high-end graphics adapter sector. PCIe is the second latest buzz in the high-end sector. And everybody else is condemned to abstinence from the ultimate eye candy offered by the new generation of video games, not to mention smooth game play without tearing and smearing of the images caused by insufficient GPU power.

The move to exclusivity of PCIe as the sole interface of high end GPUs may have been a bit premature, the biggest sector of the enthusiast gaming market is after all that of the DYI system builders, especially those that are willing to shell out some extra money if it's worth it but who otherwise have built a reputation of mercilessly twaining out any possible resource in their existing system configuration via overclocking or other system optimizations. Needless to say that this group is by necessity very budget-conscious, too, and if there is any way to get the performance without the price tag, that's where the entire flock will be heading.

Too bad that corporate marketing initially overlooked that fact but to give credit where credit is due, high-end graphics cards with AGP interface to retrofit the existing systems are back with a vengeance. One example is Sapphire's RADEON X850XT. As the saying goes, not all that glitters is gold but that's why they took it up one level to the Platinum Edition.

Sapphire RADEON X850XT PE / AGP Version
Dual Slot Cooling, AGP, SVGA, DVI S-video and Analog Video-In (yellow connector in the back) are the combined features of the most powerful AGP (gaming) graphics card ever made (and which probably won't change)

Graphics adapters have hardly ever been as dominating a factor for gaming performance as they are now. Pixel shaders, vertex shaders take over the workload fro the CPU, Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are a must when it comes to delivering pleasing images and some of the latest games look plain and simply ugly if not run on the latest GPUs. In a world where about every high end graphics card available features native support for PCI Express, this also means that in order to play in the realm of eye candy, there is no more option of simply upgrading the graphics card. Rather, a complete system makeover is due including the migration to a new mainboard supporting PCIe. Given the price levels of some of the new boards, this does constitute a rather steep premium over the already inflated street prices of high end graphics adapters.

In other words, upgrading from a plebeian ATI RADEON X800 Pro to any solution featuring 16 pixel pipelines as opposed to the available 12 could easily double the $200 difference incurred by a simple upgrade, even without the depreciation of the older card. Not included in this equation is the necessary time to reconfigure the entire system configuration, especially the Windows environment with chipset drivers, ACPI drivers and not even to mention the problems associated with migrating from one RAID controller (integrated on the old mainboard) to another (integrated on the new mainboard).

At least, that’s what the state of the art was like some 3 months ago. AGP was dead, an obsolete technology, insufficient to provide the bandwidth needed for the GPUs to work properly. Only, there are differences between marketeering and reality. The reality, indeed turned out to be a situation where the new platform only grabbed a fraction of the existing market, a much larger portion was completely ignored -- the aftermarket.

All in all, the situation was essentially a tour de force to add reality to some roadmaps. By itself, this is a good idea since roadmaps are, generally speaking, marketing lies to keep the interest of the public focused on some hypothetical products that will make the world a better place. In due time, these cynosures are replaced with some scaled down, albeit feasible product lines that actually meet the demand of the marketplace, rather than spawning some cryptic and lapidary, yet trivial statements from the usual suspects a.k.a. analysts. Well, we love roadmaps after all, we even (grudgingly) love analysts but most of all, we love reality or sanity checks.

Somebody somewhere must have done a reality check, how could it otherwise be that all of a sudden, the bad technology that had fettered the progress of real-time image processing for the longest time did turn out to be the prodigal son after all. As a result, we have witnessed an infusion of high-end graphics adapters into the marketplace. Examples are the top of the line GPUs from ATI, bridged to meet the specifications of the old AGP platform. Or was that simply a way to clear out inventory and make way to the next generation of GPU based on the 520 core?

The question we are asking is whether there is any reason – other than reluctance with respect of touching the system core - to upgrade to a high end solution with built-in obsolescence. After all, there are relatively inexpensive SLI solutions already available from nVidia and more are supposed to emerge from ATI within the next few weeks.

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