PCI Express represents 15 per cent of add-in cards

PCI EXPRESS ADOPTION is taking its time. It is having a hard time to establish itself as the primary choice for consumers and gamers. Regardless of all reviews and the noise that reviewers and the industry are making, AGP is still by far much more popular than PCIe.

We talked to many manufactures about the percentage of PCIe cards shipped in the last quarter and it turns out that only fifteen to seventeen per cent of all cards are actually PCIe. Shocking, as most reviews you can read nowadays are PCIe card reviews.

Nvidia and ATI leaders expect that these numbers will climb quarter by quarter and you don't need to be the Wizard of Oz to come to such a conclusion.

For quite a long while, graphic card users - let's call them gamers - will face a very steep road to upgrade as they have to change most of their PCs in order to upgrade to PCIe. For example, many enthusiasts have Nforce 2 based boards powered with various Athlon XP CPUs and we've already pointed out that there won't be any PCIe based socket A boards.

You have to change motherboard, sometimes CPU, and possibly the PSU just to make your new PCIe graphic card work. That's a nasty investment.

As for brand new PCs, it won't be a problem because manufacturers such as Dell and the others will provide you a PC powered with PCIe card and everything else from day one.

So both ATI and Nvidia will continue shipping AGP cards and all ATI cards now can be turned to AGP and Nvidia still has AGP for each market segment. All future R5xx chips from ATI will still have their corresponding AGP part using the Rialto bridge, and we expect that Nvidia will do the same with its G70 and other future chips. µ