It's interesting, but just as last year's nVidia Riva 128 chips performed before them, the Riva TNT chips seem to retain the same "10% lower" PCI performance compared to an identical AGP version. The PCI card's 2D marks were just as strong as the AGP variant, the differences all occurred on the 3D side of the coin.

This is to be somewhat expected, as even games that don't specifically call for texture shifting to the system's DRAM benefit from AGP's natural bus speed increase of 66MHz (up from PCI's 33MHz).

A 10% performance gain is all a consumer should expect to gain from choosing an AGP card vs. an identical PCI model...for now. In the near future, we'll say about six to eight months from now, you can bet that PCI-based cards will be staggeringly slower than any then-current AGP-based product. Game textures will simply be too large for the handicapped PCI bus to be able to handle (it's funny calling the PCI bus handicapped, I remember the days when PCI seemed like it had limitless bandwidth compared to the 400% slower ISA bus at that time....)

In any case, unless buyers are on a severe budget or plan on upgrading their 2D/3D card again in six months, a PCI-based card based on any new chipset doesn't seem like the best choice out there. We'd rather see people drop the $170 investment into their mainboard and SDRAM, and make the jump to an AGP-capable system. In the long run it seems to be a better choice than stalling and dumping money into one PCI card after the other.