Graphics Aperture size

[S0Y73NTGR33N]

Hi, I have an ASUS K8V-SE dlx and a Radeon 9600-xt. I'm looking through settings in my BIOS and ran across a setting for Graphics Aperture size. What is this? Will changing this make my video better or faster?

 

[Matthias99]

Please use the search function (search for "AGP Aperture"). You are not the first person (by far) with this question.

Generally (as with all BIOS settings), you should leave it alone unless you have a good reason to be messing with it. Generally the default settings are fine.

 

[BlueWeasel]

As far as performance goes, you're not going to see any kind of large gain by using different aperture sizes. Generally, the default setting of 128mb or 256mb is fine, but I've read some games crashing as the result of a particular size.

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: S0Y73NTGR33N
Hi, I have an ASUS K8V-SE dlx and a Radeon 9600-xt. I'm looking through settings in my BIOS and ran across a setting for Graphics Aperture size. What is this? Will changing this make my video better or faster?

Here's an article on it
LINK

Fern

 

[effee]

Rule of thumb is to set it to half your gfx cards memory

 

[AMD Die Hard]

My Geforce 6800 manual said to set it to 4mb for my card.

 

[bacillus]

Originally posted by: AMD Die Hard
My Geforce 6800 manual said to set it to 4mb for my card.

are you sure you didn't mean 64MB? Using a 4MB aperture size would probably disable bus mastering which would greatly impact on your videocard' s performance.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Lol...yeah bacillus.

Doesn't anyone know how to use the search engine though?

In case you dont want to use links and stiuff AGP Aperture is simply memory that is allocated for AGP use. If you run out of texture memory on a video card (ie texture memory overflow) then youll obviously need more therefore it uses the stuff you allocated to aperture for that texture memory. It is a lot slower, fast writes were supposed to fix the latencies and bypass the processor and stuff but it hardly ever works.

-Kevin

 

[S0Y73NTGR33N]

Ok well my graphics card has 256MB DDR so I should set it to 128? Right now it's at 64... I'm gonna try it and see what happens.

-Green

 

[Maggotry]

Originally posted by: S0Y73NTGR33N
Ok well my graphics card has 256MB DDR so I should set it to 128? Right now it's at 64... I'm gonna try it and see what happens.

-Green

Run some benches and post results. I expect the results to be trivial. Maybe in the future someone else will come across this thread and see your benches. 😉

 

[n7]

There's a big thread in Rage3D where they benched cards at different aperture sizes...& results were a tiny bit better for higher settings, but not worthy of switching from whatever it's defaulted at (64, 128, whatever).

 

[caz67]

Leave it at system default..

 

[thermalpaste]

Graphics aperture size basically comes into play if your AGP card runs out of memory. Thus the textures are transferred to the physical mem(RAM) if you run out of GPU mem. 128+megs is sufficient for majority of the games, so even if you set your aperture size to 256 MB, it won't make a difference.

 

[imported_thomash]

Quote:
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Rule of thumb is to set it to half your gfx cards memory
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Oh, after reading this I may think of lowerig my Graphics Apeture size in BIOS.

I've always thought it should be set to the memory size on your GFX Card. Mine's set to 256mb as my GFX card has 256mb memory. Better run some benchmarks to see if it makes any difference?


EDIT:
But I've just read on this website that fern gave a link to:

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The requirement for AGP memory space shrinks as the graphics card's local memory increases in size. This is because the graphics card will have more local memory to dedicate to texture storage. So, if you upgrade to a graphics card with more memory, you shouldn't be "deceived" into thinking that you will need even more AGP memory! On the contrary, a smaller AGP memory space will be required.

It is recommended that you keep the AGP aperture around 64MB to 128MB in size, even if your graphics card has a lot of onboard memory. This allows flexibility in the event that you actually need extra memory for texture storage. It will also keep the GART (Graphics Address Relocation Table) within a reasonable size.
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