Great 3dmark score improvement

[yelo333]

I've never had such an improvement by tweaking EVER!

I had the official 3.10 ati drivers.
I have a radeon 9000 64mb(non-pro),axp 2000+,256mb ram
wit hthe official ati drivers, I got 2550 3dmarks
I flipped to the omega's, and followed his bios tweaks(staying away from any which oc'd, as I don't want my temp's to go any higher than they are)
I got 6551 3dmarks - right on where everbody else gets with this card
all I changed was:
shadowing, cahceing turned off(for sys bios, vid ram, etc.)
init displayfirst(which probably didn't do a thing anyway)
pci/vga palette snoop(don't think that's the thing)
AGP aperature size(probably the biggie, but I never had much luck with it)from 64mb to 128 mb
agp spread specturum set to disabled

That was it.
could somebody please tell me where you think I got the boost?(and any more help tweaking)

 

[NYCSTE2003]

if anyone can explain this or if u can get back to me that would be great, how can i do it too

 

[UptheMiddle]

What version of 3DMark are you using? I'm really impressed if you're using 2003....

For my old Pentium II with a GeForce2 GTS 32MB, I had some significant improvement when I increased my AGP Aperature size, so my guess is that this was the magic wand...

 

[NYCSTE2003]

what exactly is AGP Aperature size, my card is 128mb and for some reason my mobo stays at 64 after a reformat, and i change it to 128 is that normal?

 

[UptheMiddle]

From another forum post:
depending on the amount of physical RAM you have, I would set the AGP Aperature as high as the BIOS will allow, Then if all ok, leave it. If there are any problems, set back one step. you should be able to run it really high, or max, depends on all the other programmes you may also use.
If you have enough RAM and set the aperature high enough, you might want to try running without a page file system.
For instance, with 1Gb of ram, and turning off the page file system, you can expect to see about a 5% increase in your 3dMarks (assumes your aperature is set really low right now - 64MB)

 

[us3rnotfound]

n00bs

 

[UptheMiddle]

We're all just trying to learn here. I'm pretty new, very true, but if you have some insight, please share

 

[NYCSTE2003]

bump shminu is a jerk

 

[igowerf]

Maybe the Omega drivers has FSAA and AF set to app preference by default.

 

[UptheMiddle]

Originally posted by: shminu
n00bs

I think he may have been referring to the HUGE increase in the benchmark. Not likely to obtain that increase by merely tweaking. But, I am still interested if someone knows a great deal about AGP aperture and how to adjust it to maximize system performance for 3D games....

 

[BlueWeasel]

The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide (see the AGP section)

 

[UptheMiddle]

Nice website, Blue Weasel! Thanks, I'm sure it'll be usefull to many of us.