APERTURE size 64m????

[Maverick2002]

just wondering what that setting is in the BIOS and what it does and what does changing it do (like from 64m to 128m)
thx

 

[medic]

From one of the best bios guides/swap file optimization guides ect. out there (and a member here) Adrian's Bios Guide is one excellent read....

Adrian's Rojak Pot

A Sample:

At the moment, the rule of the thumb is an AGP aperture size of about 64MB to 128MB. Increasing the AGP aperture size beyond 128MB wouldn't really hurt performance but it would still be best to keep the aperture size to about 64MB-128MB so that the GART table won't be too large. As the amount of onboard RAM increases and texture compression becomes commonplace, there's less of a need for the AGP aperture size to increase beyond 64MB. So, it's recommended that you set the AGP Aperture Size as 64MB or at most, 128MB.

 

[Maverick2002]

my BIOS only lets me take it to 128, but is there a performance diff. between 64 and 128?

 

[medic]

It's very individual depending on your system specs, I would leave it at 64MB and run all your favourite benchmarks and move it to 128MB and see if there is a performance increase.

(Hmmmm maybe I will as well)

 

[LocutusX]

And a good benchmark I'd like to mention, for testing the effects of increased AGP aperture, is timedemoing Q3A at different resolutions using the following NV15 demo.

http://www.quake3stuff.com/downstats.asp?dlurl=/files/maps/nv15/nv15.zip

> timedemo 1
> demo nv15demo

 

[Midnight Rambler]

I thought the "rule of thumb" was set the AGP aperture size to 1/2 of total system memory?

 

[Dark4ng3l]

yea 1/2 system memory is what it should be set at.

 

[Maverick2002]

ok cool so since i now have 128mb ill keep it at 64, once i get 256 ill go to 128mb.......now i must ask whats the logic behind this "rule of thumb"

 

[LocutusX]

Good question Maverick. Since I just upgraded to 256mb today, but my aperture is still set to 64mb from before, I'll run some benches and see how much of an improvement 128mb aperture brings. If there's no improvement, or less than 5%, I'll think I'll go back to 64mb, to prevent the swapping I'd likely get when exiting a game that uses that much AGP memory.

 

[Maverick2002]

swapping? what swapping? man im clueless when it comes to this stuff......plz explain......thx

 

[Maverick2002]

hey locutusX you there? man......someone explain this.......

 

[LocutusX]

Sorry, I went to sleep.

Anyways I haven't had time to compare 64mb aperture to 128mb aperture because I have a number of other things to tweak and test out before then, so hope that someone else does it. Anyways, "swapping" is what occurs when the system has to "SWAP" the contents of physical memory with virtual memory on the hard drive. i.e. you finish playing Q3A on a 64mb system, as you quit the game and return to windows, the system has to load explorer, systray, blah blah into physical memory from virtual memory -- because presumably Q3A would have used all of physical memory on a 64mb system.