Are Most People Wrong About AGP Aperture Size?

[ghuytro]

I came across this piece of advice on setting your AGP Aperture size from a pretty comprehensive BIOS guide at Lost Circuits:

"With the increase of on-board graphics memory (currently up to 128 MB on the video card itself) this option has lost its relevance. Were the original recommendations to set the AGP aperture to about ½ of the total system memory, a good approximation now would be:

AGP Aperture = Total system memory / (video memory [MB] /2)"

http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/bios2/12.shtml

Meaning that if you had 256MB of RAM and a 64MB graphics card, according to this, your AGP aperture size should be 8MB.

Hmm....

What do you guys think of this? I've always been told that you should set your AGP Aperture to 1/2 your system memory and this is what I've always done.

 

[panhead49]

this is not what we have been told over the years.....first time i've seen something like this!!!! is it true????
(from web site)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total system memory / (video memory [MB] /2)

In other words, if you are running 128 MB system memory and have a 4 MB video
card, the optimal AGP aperture would be:
128 MB / (4/2) = 64 MB
For a 8 MB video card, the equation would be:
128 MB / (8/2) = 32 MB
and for a 64 MB video card:
128 MB (64/2) = 4 MB
----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[BFG10K]

That's right, I'd agree with that. If you have a 32 MB board or higher, don't set the aperture size to more than 64 MB. Otherwise you're just wasting memory. In fact with a 64 MB board I'd set it to the lowest value I could without disabling it completely.

I'm constantly amazed when I see people allocate 128 MB (or more!) RAM and they have 32 MB or 64 MB video cards. It's a total waste.