AGP Aperture size?

[aolsuxs]

I have a P3 450 with 256Mb Ram and a TNT2 32MB Non ultra, my bios for AGP Aperture size only gives me the option of 64MB and 256MB, Which would be the better setting and why?


Thank you all in advanced,
A

 

[Mucman]

I have always heard 1/2 system RAM is the best option... I really don't know why though.

hmmm... I guess that doesn't really help does it? Oh well, I tried

 

[PaulUK]

I too have just the 2 options and have tried both - doesn't seem to make any difference at all

 

[Mem]

When I had 128mb of ram I used 64mb(half rule)anyway now I`ve 256mb I still use 64mb it really does not make any difference.

 

[Lowfat]

I agree with Mem, it does not make any difference what you set it to. I use 256 cause it's a bigger number and I like that in a computer

 

[ahfung]

In you case both 64 or 256MB is ok. The bottom line determining AGP aperture size is:

Never set the size smaller than that of your onboard video memory

 

[BFG10K]

Set it to 64 MB as anything more is wasteful.

ahfung:

Never set the size smaller than that of your onboard video memory

Where did you read this?

 

[ahfung]

"Set it to 64 MB as anything more is wasteful."

I don't think so. Normally the AGP aperture doesn't eat away your physical memory under Windows until game/applications call for more space for texture/polygon vertices. When no longer needed it just releases any unused memory to the OS. AGP couldn't compare with onboard video memory in bandwidth, but still it is better than nothing

"Where did you read this? "

Just my experience. Up the AGP aperture size from 32 to 64MB, it yields some obvious increase in benchmark/game performance for TNT2/GeForce 32MB. Decreasing the size to 16MB or below will seriously hurt the performance, as if some of the onboard video memory were disabled. Therefore I come up with the idea:

For true AGP graphic cards, onboard video memory is a subset of total AGP memory. This is similar to OS memory management where "the physical memory" is only a part of "total system memory", and the extra AGP memory behaves exactly like page file or "virtual memory".

Of coures this is just my thought, please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[vss1980]

Though this answer has no technical reasoning, most motherboards I have seen from various makers (and I am talking from no-name motherboard, to some of the best like ABit and Asus) seem to default to 64MB as the aperture size.