AGP Aperature size?

[AgaBoogaBoo]

What is the AGP aperature size and what does it do?

My 3DMark scores aren't as high as they should be and so I'm trying to find out what all these mean....

 

[Corporate Thug]

from Asus:

This BIOS feature allows you to select the size of the AGP aperture. The aperture is a portion of the PCI memory address range dedicated as graphics memory address space. Host cycles that hit the aperture range are forwarded to the AGP without need for translation. The aperture size also determines the maximum amount of system RAM that can be allocated to the graphics card for texture storage.

 

[cheetoden]

Since today's graphics cards have so much on-board memory, this doesn't need to be set any higher than 64MB

 

[Ketchup]

But I would not set it below 64 either. I set it at 8 MB once to see what would happen, and it's not pretty. I have a theory that your video card will use your system memory, even if it does not use all the memory on the card. For example, the new 256 MB cards are not any faster than 128 MB cards, but I bet they still use system memory.

 

[tweeve]

When i set my APG aperatue size to 256 instead of 128 i got a big boost in my games like UT and BattleFiled. Also when my brother before he upgraded his video card was running a TNT2 card with 32 MB of RAM on it and 768 MB of system RAM and it was keeping up with a system that was Twice its speed in almost any game that we play. with 256 AGP Aperatue.

 

[zephyrprime]

[/quote]new 256 MB cards are not any faster than 128 MB cards, but I bet they still use system memory. [/quote]Of course they aren't. No game loads more than 128MB of textures so no game benefits from 256MB of ram. But if you run at high res and use big AA factors, then a 256mb card can be useful.