AGP

Abbreviation for Accelerated Graphics Port, which is a dedicated video card port found on some PC and Macintosh computers. It conforms to a bus specification from Intel that greatly speeds up graphics display and texture rendering, especially virtual reality and 3D rendering and display. Rather than using the PCI bus for graphics data, AGP introduces a dedicated point-to-point channel so that the graphics controller can directly access main memory. The AGP channel is 32 bits wide and runs at 66 MHz. This translates into a total bandwidth of 266 MBps, as opposed to the PCI bandwidth of 133 MBps. AGP provides a coherent memory management design which allows scattered data in system memory to be read in rapid bursts, thereby reducing the overall cost of creating high-end graphics subsystems by using existing system memory.