AGP Aperture Size

[ICEVaPa]

I was just wondering what the 'AGP Aperture Size' is?

What does it do and what should it be on???

Does it have something to do with your Graphics card in your AGP slot?

One more thing, How hot does a Geforce4 Ti4600 get? If it is too hot to toutch, is it too hot? If i does get too hot will i see if something is wrong, or will it just blow without warning....

The reason i ask is because I have a Micro ATX board, and my LAN card and Geforce are practicly on each other, and when i toutch the bottom of this card(where the proccesor is) it is very, very hot!

Thanx for your help!

 

[spanky]

hope this link works

 

[AnAndAustin]

Nice link spankyOO7.

ICEVaPa put simply the AGP Aperture is the MAXIMUM amount of system RAM which can be used by the gfx card mostly only if the gfx card runs out of its own texture RAM. Firstly even 64MB gfx cards rarely need to use any extra storage space and secondly logicaly there are no gains to having a huge Aperture Size although some people disagree. An important thing to note is adding system RAM to the gfx card for texture storage is both slow and inefficient even though it is better than running out completely, if you set 128MB Aperture NO system RAM will be used until the gfx card needs it (generally when its own RAM limit has been breached), if all 128MB of system RAM was assigned to the gfx card the gfx card would only end up with 58MB of extra storage (take off 12MB and then half it). You should never ideally set Aperture to more than half of your total RAM, if you want my rec set it to 128MB whether you have 256MB or 1GB of system RAM.

 

[ICEVaPa]

Thanks for the info...

Good link Spanky007.

I take it that if the APG Aperture Size is increased, it should not make the card hotter?

 

[movinslow]

Originally posted by: ICEVaPa
I take it that if the APG Aperture Size is increased, it should not make the card hotter?

Correct!

Some say that having higher agp aperture helps 3D Mark...when I dropped mine from 128 to 64, I lost 500 marks. But there may have been other factors...I didn't exactly close all running programs

 

[AnAndAustin]

AGP Aperture has no effect on the gfx card's over all speed or running temps, it simply specifies how much system RAM the gfx card can take should it find it necessary which will very rarely happen with any 64MB gfx card anyway. Rem this is a MAXIMUM system RAM the gfx card can use for itself, if the gfx card need 4MB more is will only use 4x2+12=20MB of system RAM to provide itself with 4MB mroe texture storage.

 

[BFG10K]

The link explains AGP aperture fairly well although it is possible in certain situations that RAM will be wasted if you set it too high. Leave it at 64 MB unless you're having problems.

Rem this is a MAXIMUM system RAM the gfx card can use for itself

That's not quite true, it's the maximum area of AGP address space. If the card exceeds that space it'll spill over to the normal system RAM but of course it won't receive the benefits of an AGP address space and Windows will treat it just like regular data.

I take it that if the APG Aperture Size is increased, it should not make the card hotter?

The AGP aperture has absolutely no effect on video card temperatures.

 

[ScrewFace]

If you have a 128MB card you don't have to worry about AGP Aperture size at all as no game currently uses all of the 128MB of onboard memory and by the time they do you're gonna see cards with 256MB of DDRII-SDRAM so don't worry about it. I got my AGP Aperture Size set to the smallest it'll go: 32MB.