Sapphire evidently still believe there to a reasonable sized market for AGP graphics, releasing an ATI X1600Pro card in an AGP flavour. This allows people to benefit from such features as ATI's Avivo technology and SM3.0 support without having to upgrade their motherboard as well.

For further details, you can read Sapphire's press release here folks.

Supporting the upgrade and retrofit markets using the industry standard AGP bus, leading graphics supplier Sapphire Technology is now shipping AGP versions of its latest series of graphics accelerators. Based on an exciting new architecture this family is now delivering the most sophisticated yet affordable graphics processing solutions to this market.

Based on a completely new architecture, the new X1600 series has been designed to deliver high efficiency, high performance in Shader Model 3.0 and enhanced image quality. The architecture also supports AvivoTM delivering vibrant high fidelity images and video playback to the latest High Definition (HD) video standards. The new AGP version delivers exciting new levels of display quality and performance to this industry standard graphics interface.