To think we used have make do with graphics cards that had mere kilobytes of memory on board and fitted into a spare ISA or the-then more advanced PCI slot on a motherboard.
They were, of course, the bees knees back then, and for the sake of running something like Commander Keen, they did the job well enough. However, as always in this field of interest, time marches ever onward and as the games, imaging and even running the operating system became more resource hungry, the performance and power required from the graphics card grew exponentially.
The old ISA was out, gone and never to be seen again. PCI was newer, but couldn't deliver the bandwidth needed for the next generation of graphics card. This is when AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) started to make an appearance.
AGP was introduced in 1996 and brought to the market - as in made available by motherboard manufacturers - in 1997. This brought a dedicated connection for the graphics card, a connection that was blisteringly fast and never had to compete with any other device for resources and communications with the CPU and memory.
Its History
Intel brought forth the AGP 1.0 slot on its new generation of Pentium Socket 7 motherboards. The AGP 1.0 slot required 3.3V, had a clock speed of 66MHz and could throw resources around the system at a rate of around 256MB per second.
It may not sound like much, but back then these were speeds as yet unheard of in a mainstream, publicly available home computer.
As the AGP slot evolved, the bandwidth increased significantly. AGP 1.0 offered 1x and 2x speeds, AGP 2.0 and 3.0 offered 4x and 8x, which in terms of bandwidth classes equalled something along the lines of: AGP 1x - 256MB/S, AGP 2x - 534MB/S, AGP 4x - 1066MB/S, AGP 8x - 2133MB/S
The AGP slot was also the first connection on the motherboard to offer varying-sized notches to prevent the wrong type of AGP card being slotted in and the first to include the locking clip at the back of the slot.
The result of this bandwidth were the first real 3D cards, the 3D Voodoo Banshees of the world, and the games and programs that drew on such phenomenal power. Eventually, though, the demand for even faster bandwidth and more powerful cards gave way to the PCIe, which had bandwidth classes up to 16000MB/S. There were a few examples toward the end of its life, with AGP Pro, Ultra-AGP and Ultra-AGPII, but they couldn't keep up with the newer, higher-performing technology.
The Good
AGP brought us 3D gaming and 3D design graphics cards and for that we'll be forever grateful.
The Bad
The AGP slot could be tweaked by overdockers more than any other graphics technology before it, but an overzealous tweaker could brick their entire motherboard with a poor choice of voltage settings. Remember, there weren't any of these solid-state capacitors or dual BIOS thingies back then.
You took overclocking in very small steps, powered on and if Windows didn't crash, you moved it up a notch.
Conclusion
AGP taught us a lot about BIOS settings, overdocking and introduced the mind-numbing variety of numbers, makes and models to enthusiast computing. Where once you could roughly follow a conversation on motherboards, it suddenly became laced with code numbers, voltages and bandwidth.
For that we thank you, Intel and the AGP slot.
Did You Know...
• The Nvidia Geforce card was the first 3D-accellerated, transform and lighting, triangle data handling AGP performance card.
• Windows NT AGP graphics drivers were slightly better than Windows 2000's.
• A 'friend' once claimed he owned a dual slot AGP motherboard. We never saw it, though, and still don't believe it existed.
• We think the Radeon HD3850 was the most powerful AGP card ever made. What do you think?