An interface developed by Intel in 1997 which allows a graphics card to access system memory and the processor directly, rather than using the PCI bus which was shared by any other PCI devices.

This dedicated bus greatly improved the video performance compared to the PCI interface, which was in common use at the time.

PCI Express has now superseded AGP as the graphics interface of choice, although a few graphics card manufacturers are still producing AGP video cards.

You will see AGP cards advertised with different specifications, including throughput (bandwidth), here is a summary of the throughput they refer to:

1X - 266MBps
2X - 533MBps
4X - 1.07GBps
8X - 2.1GBps

Ultra-AGP - 2.1GBps
Ultra-AGPII - 3.2GBps

The higher the throughput is the more data that can be transferred, which results in higher performance.

For more info on video cards (graphics cards) click here.

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