What is the Accelerated Graphics Port?
The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) interface is a new platform bus specification that enables high performance graphics capabilities, especially 3 dimensional, on PCs. It is a dedicated bus from the graphics subsystem to the core-logic chipset. This new bus shifts the memory requirements for the 3D portions of a graphics subsytem from the local frame buffer memory to main system memory The benefits of AGP include: • Peak Bandwidth 4x the PCI bus, and higher sustained rates via sideband addressing and pipelining, and more data transfers per clock • enables graphics cards to execute texture maps directly from system memory instead of forcing it to pre-load the texture data to the graphics’s cards local memory – Direct Memory Execute of textures. • Reduced Contention with the CPU and I/O devices for bus and memory access. The PCI bus serves disk controllers, LAN chips, and possibly video capture. AGP operates concurrently with, and independent from, most transactions on PCI. Further, CPU
