In ancient times (8 to 10 years ago), we would feel very pleased with ourselves looking at the impressive graphics of Doom and Castle Wolfenstein. The graphic cards were PCI based and not exactly what you would call high-end by today’s standards.

A few years later, things changed and we got a new technology from Intel, codenamed AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port). This revolutionized the way we perceived gaming by giving a dedicated bus to the graphics card, thereby enabling programmers to create a richer gaming experience for end-users.

Since that fated day in July 1996, graphics technology has never looked back and we were plastered with upgrades from 1x to 2x to 4x and finally 8x.

The games have more or less kept pace with the available bandwidth and we got some incredibly realistic gaming experience with the likes of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry and many more gaming titles.

Then Intel came out, yet again, and informed us that AGP was passé and we needed something a lot faster to keep up with future needs. The technology was called PCI Express (PCIe), which was revolutionary because not only did it exclude dedicated bus to the graphics cards, but it was also applicable across the entire motherboard, thereby replacing the archaic PCI technology.

The biggest advantage of having PCIe is that we can finally install two graphics cards inside the same system and use two GPUs at the same time, thanks to NVIDIA’s SLI (and ATI’s Crossfire) technology. In conjecture, you should not be limited to just two cards, but that concept is still under development. Besides, we don’t exactly need more than two GPUs to function excessively well in our games at the moment.

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