ARCHIVED: What is AGP?

AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is the specification for a type of dedicated video card interface over which the card can access system memory (RAM) at a very high transfer rate (up to 2.1GB per second at the 66 MHz PCI bus clock speed). This provides up to eight times the bandwidth of the PCI bus.

AGP is one part of the solution to the memory requirements of accelerated 3D video. Video cards use on-board memory for storing images, textures, and geometry data, which allows the video hardware direct, rapid access to it. The amount of data is very large, and the speed at which it must be transferred from the system memory is too high for the PCI bus. The high bandwidth capability of the AGP allows data to move rapidly from main memory to video RAM.

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