Chapter 5: Summarizing: the Benefits of AGP Before moving on, let's take a moment to summarize the key benefits of AGP. Peak bandwidth is four-times higher than the PCI bus thanks to pipelining, sideband addressing, and data transfers that occur on both rising and falling edges of the clock. Direct execution of texture maps from system memory. AGP enables high-speed direct access to system memory by the graphics controller, rather than forcing it to pre-load the texture data into local video memory. Less PCI bus congestion. The PCI bus attaches a wide variety of I/O devices, such as disk controllers, LAN chips, and video capture systems. AGP operates concurrently with, and independent from, most transactions on PCI. Further, CPU accesses to system memory can proceed concurrently with AGP memory reads by the graphics controller. Improved system concurrency for balanced PC performance. The Pentium II processor can perform other activities while the graphics chip is accessing texture data in system memory. Chapter 6 Table of Contents