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PCI Local Bus

The most popular interface used in current motherboards is the PCI bus. Introduced in 1993, PCI became popular as the Pentium came to dominate the market, and is now the standard of choice in most high-end systems. It offers local bus performance and solves many of the problems associated with VLB, and introduces a host of new features including Plug and Play and bus mastering. See here for full details on PCI and its features.

PCI cards offer the best performance available in mainstream video cards today (though AGP is changing this). Although the PCI bus doesn't technically offer any great improvements performance-wise over VLB, PCI cards are almost always faster if only because they are newer and use more modern chipsets. They also typically offer more acceleration features.

Next: Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)

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