AGP vs. PCI

[xsbs52x]

i am going to buy an all-in-wonder 8500DV but it is an AGP card. which is better for capturing, AGP or PCI? i have a P4 system and ati's website says it is not recommended to install any pci graphics card on a P4 system due to its limitations. i think the FAQ that mentions that is a little out of date so im wondering. i do not do a lot of gaming, but i want to be able to capture without dropped frames or loss of quality. how will the fact that the card is AGP affect my captures?

[Richard_Cranium]

The AGP was created so that the video card would not fight in PCI bus traffic thus improving its performance.As far as capturing it probably won`t make much difference since many stand alone capture cards are PCI based(such as mine)and capture without losing frames as long as the source is good and the system is in a good state of tune.ATI does use the AGP to pass some video information.So if your MB has an AGP,definatly use it.

[andkiich]

An AGP card has faster throughput between itself and the motherboard than a PCI card will. If anything, it will probably help stabalize your capture process(less dropped frames etc.), although that is subjective and a guess on my part. I've always had AGP graphics cards sinfce i started capturing.

[xsbs52x]

ok thanks. i currently have a pci tv tuner that i capture with. i get more dropped frames then i would like but that could be because of a number of things. i doubt it has much to do with the fact that the card is PCI.

so basically what you are saying is that it wont make much difference and if anything it should help the preformance?

[Richard_Cranium]

If your getting a severe amount of dropped frames on a P4 1.6 then you need to find out why(apps running,outdated drivers,etc.).I used capture with a similar device on a 500mhz machine with little frame loss.You most likely get the same problem if its something that is tying up the cpu.

[Piccoro]

Also...aside from agp being separate from PCI bus, it runs at 66mhz. PCI runs at 33mhz. Defraging always helps on cluttered drives. I partition my 80gb for 25gb space for OS and programs and the rest partitioned for capture or projects. They show up as two separate drive letters. Or capture to a 2nd HDD.

[xsbs52x]

well i dont get a lot of dropped frames unless i dont defrag or something like that. i capture to a 40 GB slave drive. it used to be a fat32 drive but i converted it to NTFS. i am going to format it because i think it will run better from a clean NTFS format rather than a convert. i dont have enough HDD space to partition and my master is a 40 GB FAT32 drive with only 10 gigs of free space.

[txpharoah]

On the ATI cards, the AGP versions have faster throughput, and help a lot to prevent dropped frames when capturing high bitrate MPEG2 in VBR with noise filters active (MMC 8.x).