AGP - Legacy Use

Legacy Use

By 2010 few new motherboards had AGP slots. No new motherboard chipsets were equipped with AGP support, but motherboards continued to be produced with older chipsets with support for AGP.

Graphics processors of this period use PCI-Express, a general-purpose (not restricted to graphics) standard that supports higher data transfer rates and full-duplex. To create AGP-compatible graphics cards, those chips require an additional PCIe-to-AGP bridge-chip to convert PCIe signals to and from AGP signals. This incurs additional board costs due to the need for the additional bridge chip and for a separate AGP-designed circuit board.

Various manufacturers of graphics cards continued to produce AGP cards for the shrinking AGP user-base. The first bridged cards were the GeForce 6600 and ATI Radeon X800 XL boards, released during 2004-5. In 2009 AGP cards from Nvidia had a ceiling of the GeForce 7 Series. In 2011 DirectX 10-capable AGP cards from AMD vendors (Club 3D, HIS, Sapphire, Jaton, Visiontek, Diamond, etc.) included the Radeon HD 2400, 3450, 3650, 4350, 4650, and 4670. The HD 5000 AGP series mentioned in the catalyst software was never available. There were many problems with the AMD Catalyst 11.2 - 11.6 AGP hotfix drivers under Windows 7 with the HD 4000 series AGP video cards; use of 10.12 or 11.1 AGP hotfix drivers is the recommended workaround. Several of the vendors listed above make available past versions of the AGP drivers.