Shoutbox

What I said still stands though... PCI-E or AGP doesn't make a difference as far as "compatibility with (new) games" is concearned. The difference is in how the computer 'talks' to the card.

For the game it doesn't matter if it is a AGP, PCI-E or whatever new thing will come out in a few years, it is the chipset used and/or the compatible DirectX version and other graphical CPU/features related stuff. And all that can both be done on AGP as with PCI-E. The game doesn't care what bus type the card uses, as long as the card supports the features the game needs.

This said, newer cards come of course with newer technology, which games might* use. And newer cards are often only made with the newer bus technology (thus no more AGP) in mind. But if you compare the exact same card, with the exact same graphical CPU and features, but with a different bus type (AGP vs. PCI-E), the game will run just as well without any quality loss or whatever.

* New games will almost never use the new technology available at the moment. This is actually very logically. If a game would only use the latest special and newest technology, there wouldn't be much games sold.

What will influence your game quality more (or at least equaly) is your computer processor speed, available memory, cache and harddisk speed and/or cdrom speed, not so much what type of bus the graphic cards is (a system is only as fast as the slowest component, and that is almost never the graphics card!).

So, it is still a matter of how much money you want to spend (aka: do you want to pay 50% more for just the same card, but with an other bus type?) versus what does your (futur) motherboard support.

To cap of: "I want my game to run with all the graphic stuff it can throw at me" isn't a reason to decide between PCI-E or AGP, as bus types don't matter in that case. It's the features and used chipsets of the card that matters. If the needed chipset is only available as an PCI-E card, buy it... if it is also available as an AGP card (and your futur motherboard will still support AGP!), then there is nothing wrong in sticking with AGP and your game will run just as smooth.

Then what the hell is the benefit of PCI-E? Well, as a matter of fact, you'll find many reviews which will say that PCI-E isn't that great afterall (taking the sometimes huge price difference in account). The PCI-E bus is faster though, and this means, in theory!, faster processing of graphical stuff. It also means that PCI-E cards don't need to 'work' as much as their equivalent AGP versions or to put it in another way: it can process, again in theory!, more information for the same timeframe. But all this is theory. Games from today don't really use (yet) all of the possible benefits PCI-E could offer and even if they did, there are far... far more bothlenecks in the whole pc which will slowdown any gained speed again.

Benchmarks will often show that PCI-E cards are much faster, but benchmarks aren't everything. Benchmarks are tests done under labo-conditions. There isn't something like a "everyday usage-benchmark" at all, despite what some might make you believe. This is simply because every system is different and everybody uses his own system differently or has different things running. In other words, doing a test on configuration A and comparing it with configuration B will say not much (in fact nothing at all) about 1 specific component.
A benchmark is a benchmark only when everything (including software) is exactly the same and used exactly the same. Benchmarks are just that, theoretical comparissons done under labo-conditions.
Vice versa this is true also; a benchmark between two different components but with the exact same used PC system will again not say anything at all about everyday-usage of that component in a different system, it will only say component A is better in that specific system with that specific usage than component B.

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So, if you have the money, buy a PCI-E one. If you want to buy also some other stuff (eg: extra memory!) you might just as well stick with AGP, the game will not suffer from it at all (thus that is: when talking about the exact same card with exactly the same graphical CPU and features, but with a different bus type).