AGP 4X Performance

Since none of the game benchmarks in our test suite showed any significant performance advantage with AGP 4X I decided to throw in an AGP test that purposely shoves lots of textures through the AGP bus. The results are given using Intel's Platform Bandwidth Test. This test is comprised of a complex 3D scene using the integration of video textures and movie playback along with some typical 3D graphics. There are two video streams (in .avi format) that are decoded on the fly and used as textures. I've included a screen shot of the test. In this scene the room is rotated 360 degrees while the AVI's are playing.

In this large textured-based benchmark you can see that AGP 4X can in some circumstance offer considerable performance gains.