AGP

2 Articles

A Walk Down PC Video Card Memory Lane

September 28, 2025 by 30 Comments

These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. But it wasn’t always like that. The old video cards were downright simple. Once PCs gained more sophisticated buses, video cards got a little better. But hardware acceleration on an old-fashioned VGA card would be unworthy of the cheapest burner phone at the big box store. Not to mention, the card is probably twice the size of the phone. [Bits and Bolts] has a look at several old cards, including a PCI version of the Tseng ET4000, state-of-the-art of the late 1990s.

You might think that’s a misprint. Most of the older Tseng boards were ISA, but apparently, there were some with the PCI bus or the older VESA local bus. Acceleration here typically meant dedicated hardware for handling BitBlt and, perhaps, a hardware cursor.

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A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later

March 3, 2024 by 25 Comments

For a while around a quarter century ago PC motherboards came with a special slot, a little shorter than the PCI slots which ruled the roost back then, and offset from them further into the case. This was the Accelerated Graphics Port, or AGP, a standard created to more quickly serve the 3D graphics cards which were then taking the world by storm. It was everywhere for a few years, then in the mid-2000s it was replaced by PCI Express and faded into obscurity. [Peter] has a Socket 7-based NAS with an AGP slot, and was left wondering whether the unused port could be put to a worthwhile purpose.

AGP is a superset of PCI clocked at 66 MHz, and usually benefiting from having its own exclusive bridge to the processor bus. Thus he reasoned that he could make an AGP to PCI adapter and it might work, as the right connections are all there. A hacked-together version was made by butchering two riser cards, and when a network card worked quite happily he knew he was on to something and made a PCB. There’s a caveat that it only works with 66-MHz capable PCI cards so not everything will work, but if you’re one of the very few people who must be in the market for one, he can do you a PCB.

We’d normally end with a link to a related project here, but we must instead congratulate [Peter]. As far as we can find, this is Hackaday’s first AGP hack, two decades later. Continue reading “A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later” →