check it, i dont know how to say...

[lots]

Depends on what your motherboard supports

Generally, you wont find AGP and PCIe on the same board, thus depending on which you have.. your choice should be pretty obvious :P

There are motherboards with both.. but this is a special case, and in the case of ECS (who has an "agp" slot along side the PCIe) is not a real implimentation of AGP

Also, it would help to know which cards you are trying to decide between. Simply stating ram size difference will not help.

[azloha]

my question is there are two card, one is AGP with high ram, the other is PCI-E with less ram, which one is more suitable for heavy polygon and texture.

[Tarrbot]

All things being equal (like the GPUs are the same), it would be the card with more RAM that would be better.

If the GPUs are different then it's a whole 'nother ball of wax since you could have a wimpier GPU on the AGP card and a stronger GPU on the PCI-e card which could shift the favor toward the PCI-e card depending on how much RAM we are talking about.

Since you aren't being specific, it's a bit difficult to even guess at which would be best.

[lots]

You have to give the specific cards you are trying to compare. If you are comparing a PCIe Geforce PCX 5700 with 256 megs of ram to a AGP Geforce 6600GT with 128 Megs of ram, i'd have to tell you the 6600GT would be faster. It all depends on what beats at the heart of the card. But like Tarrbot said, if the cards are the same chip, then you can compare the ram. Even tho ram only comes into play when trying to display large textures....

[UrbanFuturistic]

Actually, assuming the same chip is used in both cards and Azloha has the option of PCI-e then with the type of work (high poly-count animation, I'm assuming with a lot of changes in vertex manipulation via bones etc.) involved PCI-e would be faster.

While non-changing textures and models only being manipulated via their transform attributes (or with vertex shaders in the case of animated characters in games) are manipulated and consequently accelerated mostly by the 3D card, the moment anything non-standard comes into play (such as vertex manipulation on a CC subsurf) all the model calculations are shifted back onto the CPU before being blitted across to the graphics card for display calculations.

This means that if you're manipulating a vertex with the mouse or whatever then there's a lot of communication between what's in memory, your CPU and your graphics card and the faster that pipe the better. As PCI-e16 == 16x2xstandard PCI speed, this makes it equivelant to 32x AGP in pure throughput plus it's bidirectional.

regards, Paul

[azloha]

yes, same GPU, just difference in ram and slot type. which is better?

AGP with more ram; PCI - X with less ram...

odubtaig, u give a nice, try, but allow my poor english..., hey mum, where is my dictionary...

[lots]

heh by PCI-X I'm sure you mean PCIe (PCI Express). PCI-X is a totaly different bus architecture.

If you are in the situation you describe, more ram on the AGP and less on the PCIe, You still have the advantage of the larger pipe to the PCIe card. But, from what I've seen, hardly any software takes advantage of this large pipe. Software companies try to make thier programs run on all sorts of hardware. Thus, you're going to see them try to use the bus as little as they can in order to improve performance on lower end systems. If we talk purely in games, there is very little difference between an AGP card and its PCIe version. This is due in part to video games limiting the traffic going across the AGP/PCIe bus. Once PCIe is a bigger thing, and more people have it, we will definately see a shift into using this bus more. But until then, the performance gain is somewhat negligable, assuming identical chips on both AGP and PCIe ;)

Of cource most new video hardware is being released for the PCIe bus, and thus will eventually just "be faster" since no one will develop AGP anymore. But like I said, it will take a while for it to be accepted. After all how long did we have ISA slots after PCI was introduced ;)

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