ATI Card not showing as AGP (but is)

In attempting to work on lag problems in Second Life I noticed that under Preference/Options there is at the top a check box for AGP which would increase performance. However, it is grayed out in my preference.

I am running a ATI 9500 AGP the latest drivers dated 12/2004.

I contacted the internal support / monitors and got a unacceptable answer. "ATI cards do not show up as AGP" DAHHHH!!!!

So figured I might try this forum to see if other ATI users are experiencing the same issue or not. If you have and found out how to fix it please let me know.

If this specific topic has already been posted and there is a fix there please point me to it.

Thanks.
cnyreject

Yep, AGP seems to be disabled for ATI cards. Now, whether or not this means SL isn't actually taking advantage of AGP, I'm not sure. The tech-forum is full of threads on ATI, though, search around.

ATI's card can not handle the speed of AGP when dealing with the rapidly changing texture sets that SL requires. Ergo, SL simply greys the box out so no one comes running in here whining about how their computer crashes when they enable AGP. The problem is, of course, ATI's. ATI sucks, get a GeForce.

It is not possible for SL to disable AGP on an ATI or any other videocard. My guess is the AGP checkbox turns on the OpenGL NV_pixel_data_range extension. This speeds up pixel transfer related stuff, resulting in considerably better performance on hardware that supports it. ATI (still) doesn't support this extension so that's probably why the checkbox is disabled.

Thanks Max for a proper answer to the guys question which I also was curious about. 'Ati sucks' wasn't a very helpful reply!! I'd love to how much it does boost performance as the game already runs smoothly on my radeon X800. I should be thankful for what i've got!