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The AGP slot celebrates its tenth birthday this year and refuses to disappear despite being superseded by PCI Express in 2004. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is one such AGP card, based on ATI's RV 570 chip running at 580MHz.
A x16 PCI Express slot offers read transfer rates double that of AGP 8x slot, however, this wasn't reflected in tests. In 3Dmark03 the card scored a very respectable 14,441 and notched up 7,233 in 3DMark05. Compared with a PCI Express X1950 Pro, these scores represent decreases of 8 per cent in 3Dmark03 and 16 per cent in 3Dmark05.
In real world gaming tests we found a decrease due to using AGP of 11 per cent in Far Cry, while Half-Life 2 suffered most at 47fps – 23 per cent slower than a PCI Express equivalent.
When x4 Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), which smoothes edges, was turned on we saw no decrease at low resolutions. The PCI Express version saw drops with FSAA (although still scoring high overall), however, it has further to fall and FSAA isn't affected by the bandwidth constrictions of AGP.
Despite a moderate performance hit for using AGP, this card still provides good performance in all games at 1,024x768 and 1,280x1024 resolutions. At high resolutions gaming proved unplayable with this card.
The card features two DVI-I ports that can handle digital and analogue monitors when used with the two bundled dongles. S-video and composite cables are included to hook your PC up to a TV.
The X1950 Pro doesn't support DirectX10 like the 8800GTS and has a more modest performance but an equally modest price tag to boot. The card costs the same as PCI express version at £155, which is a fair price for the fastest AGP currently available.
All Graphics Cards Tags: Graphics Card
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