which would be better?

[weezerisrock]

I have a question for you guys. I have a customer who is buying a computer from me. I am trying to save them some money.... My question is should I go with a top of the line video card on AGP8x or go with a model or two down on PCIe? will the PCIe's expanded bandwidth make that much difference? Plus it appears that the only card on PCIe I can get that would have 256MB ram is the x800xt. I guess my question summed up would be,

can a GeForce PCX 5900 w/128MB RAM on PCIe be a serious contender against a 6800 or x800 with 256MB RAM on AGP?

[johnnyis42]

simply put, if you're looking for top of the line gamming performance, the 6800/x800 generation blows away the fx5900, period. you may not see it much with the older games, but with doom3 and halflife2 and every game hereafter that utilize those engines you have a serious advantage with the latest generation of cards. from an older generation card with 128mb to the latest generation card with 256mb,
you're talking about 30-60% performance difference with the latest gamming engines.

on the note of AGP and PCIe, even the latest and greatest family of cards don't completely flood the AGP8x bus, so you're not really looking at an improvement with those cards on a PCIe platform. on a side note there, rumors abound about the validity of "true" PCIe implimentation with those cards. there has been alot of rumor that right now everything is using an AGP to PCIe bridge implimentation, so either way you're getting AGP8x. ATI claims their implimentation is true PCIe, but either way their cards don't perform exceedingly greater on either platform.