AGP

Short for Accelerated Graphics Port, AGP is an advanced port designed for Video cards and 3D accelerators. Designed by Intel and introduced in August of 1997 AGP introduces a dedicated point-to-point channel so that the graphics controller can directly access the system memory. Below is an illustration of what the AGP slot may look like on your motherboard.

The AGP channel is 32-bits wide and runs at 66 MHz. This translates into a total bandwidth of 266 MBps, which is much greater than the PCI bandwidth of up to 133 MBps. AGP also supports two optional faster modes, with throughput of 533 MBps and 1.07 GBps. It also allows 3-D textures to be stored in main memory rather than video memory.

Each computer with AGP support will either have one AGP slot or on-board AGP video. If you needed more than one video card in the computer, you can have one AGP video card and one PCI video card or use a motherboard that supports SLI.

Not all operating systems support AGP because of limited or no driver support. For example, Windows 95 did not incorporate AGP support. See the Windows versions page for information about Windows versions that support AGP.