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AGP Requirements

There are a number of different requirements in order to allow a system to take advantage of AGP:

• AGP Video Card: This is pretty obvious.
• AGP Chipset Motherboard: The chipset on the motherboard must be able to support AGP of course.
• Operating System Support: The operating system must be able to support the new interface through its internal drivers and routines.
• Driver Support: Of course, the video card needs special drivers in order to support AGP and also to exploit special features such as "2X" mode.

Operating system support is going to be especially problematic. I am not really sure how this will end up being handled in the early days of AGP, but I suspect that it may not be until Microsoft provides AGP support in the upcoming Windows 98 that we will see AGP's popularity really start to pick up.

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