Reznor007
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PCI Express is more than just AGP 16x. I can handle bidirectional transfers, while AGP can either send or receive data.
Here's what the lead programmer of Splinter Cell thinks about PCI Express
And a Radeon card will do better than a GeforceFX in Dolphin, because nvidia's drivers have been proven to be cheating and lowering precision in pixel shader 2.0 programs. Radeon can ONLY do 24bit per channel, but GeforceFX will usually do 16bit per channel or even down to 12bit in some cases.
Here's what the lead programmer of Splinter Cell thinks about PCI Express
In my opinion, PCI-E will have a major impact on how games are designed because you should be able to finally read from the graphic chip memory without breaking the streaming of the transactions between the core logic and the GPU. PCI-E is a point to point bus meaning that it works just like HyperTransport (dedicated upstream/downstream). On AGP, when you switch between read and write, you have to turn around and that takes time.
This should allow a new range of algorithms to be possible (like on consoles). You could use the GPU to calculate very quickly zone of dangers when the player is throwing a grenade (physic blast shadowing). The information could then by passed to your AI and Physics engine to help the AI makes a good decision on how to react to this event and to find out which objects should be impacted (where and how) by the blast. This kind of shadowing algorithm may or may not be efficient (compared to distributed ray casting) but it gives some ideas.
So overall, PCI-E won't have direct impact on rendering but it will have a big impact on engine design (only programmers will notice but games are going to get better more quickly).
All of this can be done on the CPU but people are going to start looking at the GPU to do other things than just graphics. All of this because of PCI-E.
And a Radeon card will do better than a GeforceFX in Dolphin, because nvidia's drivers have been proven to be cheating and lowering precision in pixel shader 2.0 programs. Radeon can ONLY do 24bit per channel, but GeforceFX will usually do 16bit per channel or even down to 12bit in some cases.