Forsaken by Acclaim
3D Screen Saver by Colorific
Web3D by Asymetrix
Digital Video Producer by Asymetrix

When talking about AGP, users need to keep in mind what the purpose of the advanced architecture really is: To shift large textures from the limited ram on board a video card to the system's larger main DRAM.

To accomplish this quickly, AGP calls for a 66MHz bus speed level which is 2x what the PCI bus's normal speed is (33MHz). AGP also allows for side banding and other assorted techniques that can virtually quadruple the data transfer rate of the limited PCI bus.

The end result is that video cards that support the full AGP standard, including the 2x support, can be dramatically faster performers than their PCI counterparts under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, none of those "certain circumstances" currently exist...Although this is slowly changing.

Several game developers are excited about the fact that AGP is becoming not only more mainstream, but more effective as video card manufacturers move to support the full AGP spec. An example of this lies in the recent public comments made by Valve, the creative team behind the upcoming Half-Life FPS. They stated that they had to "limit the texture quality" in Half-Life to about "half the size" that they would have preferred to, due to the limited amount of DRAM on the current 3D accelerator "standard" (the Voodoo2 chipset). This is due to the fact that the Voodoo2 chipset (and the 1998 version of the upcoming Banshee chipset) don't support the full range of AGP features. The AGP versions of the Voodoo2 and Banshee do however offer a slight performance benefit under AGP intensive applications, due simply to the increased 66MHz bus speed.