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AGP is a video card only slot developed by Intel. Because of today's and upcoming 3-D games and applications, even the PCI bus isn't enough to handle the high bandwidth required. So AGP was developed to offload the graphics I/O from the PCI bus.
The AGP slot is different from the ISA or PCI slots. AGP slots are usually
brown in color; PCI slots are white, and ISA slots are black. You cannot
put anything other than an AGP video card into the AGP slot.
An important point to remember is that the AGP slot was designed mainly
to move large 3-D textures between the memory subsystem and the video card.
Therefore, if your application is strictly 2-D, having an AGP video will not
boost performance. PC Magazine ran some tests between an AGP video and
a PCI version of the same card. In their Winbench graphics test
(which is 2-D only), the results between the AGP and PCI video card are
almost identical.
According
to Intel, they will develop AGP only on Pentium II systems with the 440LX
or future chipsets. Intel will not develop any Pentium class chipset with
the AGP slot. Other chipset manufacturer such as VIA, SiS, etc. may come
out with a Pentium class AGP chipset.