May '00 Headlines

It's a fact: most "PC-naive" Americans don't want to upgrade their older machines. Reasons stem from the cost of a new machine itself to a grown loyalty to the PC, and finally the inability to comprehend the effects of `Moore's Law`-- which makes their aging system a pile of junk. More over, the graphics cards compatible with their prehistoric systems do not have any AGP slots available, as only PCI and ISA slots accompany the motherboard.

However, Nvidia has decided to cater to these stubborn individuals by offering them entry-level "AGP-style" graphics within a PCI card. The chipset powering this very graphics card is dubbed `Virtual AGP`.

Older systems, based on the Socket 7 mainboards, do not carry or support AGP slots. The only way to get video is through a PCI-based graphics adapter, which by today's standards, is relatively slow. PCI cards only run with a 33 MHz BUS, as opposed to the 66 MHz BUS utilized by AGP graphic adapters.

Nvidia's `Virtual-AGP` will squeeze the most performance as it can (for a PCI card) by including a 143/166MHz GPU and 32 MB of VRAM for display buffering. By no means will V-AGP compete with the likeness of GeForce 256 chips, but it should help users with an old Pentium MMX or AMD K6-based systems get a little bit of oomph when trying to run 3D games.

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