The PCI-Express standard was very quickly adopted by the IT industry and many video card producers abandoned AGP support as soon as Q4 2005. The old AGP format barely shows any inferior performance compared to PCI-E, but the latter was thoroughly promoted in 2005.

Diamond Multimedia is prepared to revive the AGP video cards market with its new line of ATI Radeon X1000 Viper devices. Users who haven't yet upgraded to PCI-E interface compatible motherboards are now able to power up their AGP systems with the latest X1000 generation thanks to Diamond.

Yesterday, Diamond announced the imminent availability (October) of the X1950XTX, the X1950Crossfire edition and the X1950Pro, alongside the new X1650 cards in AGP format. The PCI-E X1950XTX and Crossfire edition include 512 MB GDDR4 memory clocked at 2 Ghz and cores clocked at 650 Mhz, while the X1950 AGP editions feature 256 MB GDDR4 memories clocked at 1.4 Ghz and a core-clock of 600 Mhz.

All AGP editions support Dual DVI (X2 Dual-Link), HDTV, D-Sub, VIVO and Avivo. The XTX and Crossfire AGP editions would cost $449 and rumor has it that the X1950Pro AGP edition would be as cheap as $195, a real blessing for AGP owners. There's no information about the price of the X1650 Agp edition.