There will doubtless be a lot of disappointed gamers, but it seems the Nvidia 6800 Ultra and the ATi Radeon X850XT are the 'end of the road' for AGP gamers. Those who have been waiting for updated and improved cards to arrive have been waiting in vain, it appears.

Although Nvidia announced a while back now that it will not be producing an AGP version of its 7800 series cards, there have been quite a few AGP gamers waiting for the arrival of ATi's R520 series cards. ATi, it was rumoured, had provided for the new cards to be available in AGP format as well as in PCI-E format.

Bad news, I'm afraid! ATi will be releasing AGP versions of the X1300 and X1600 series cards, but the high end X1800 series cards will be PCI-E only! If you want that gaming beast to remain 'cutting edge' then I'm afraid it's time for a motherboard upgrade. PCI-E is the way forward!

It seems ATi have realised that not enough high end cards would be purchased in AGP format to make the adaptation worthwhile to pursue, and I'd have to agree with them. PCI-E motherboard, anyone?

Not the only reason. The performance of the AGP bus is also a limiting factor.
Unless an AGP-16x standard came around the current crop is pretty much as fast as they can get.

And also remember that the card manufacturers often also make mobos. Unless more PCI-E cards hit the market in lue of AGP cards, the uptake of PCI-E (which has been kinda slow because of the higher cost) won't really happen for a while yet.

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