what does the AGP apeture size in bios do? what are the best settings for it?

[hclarkjr]

i am wondering what kind of affect this setting has on how the video card is used and how games run. i have 1 gig of memory in my system so should i set it to the highest setting? thanx to those that have input for my question.

 

[Inept]

The AGP aperture allows some of your system RAM to be used by your graphics card if it needs it. System RAM is slower than the stuff on your AGP, so ideally you'd want to avoid using it, but in a pinch it's better than clearing and reloading the RAM that's on your AGP card all the time. If you have a graphics card with 64+ MB of RAM, you really don't need to worry about the AGP aperture at all! You could probably set it as low as 8 and not see any difference in gaming/graphics performance. If you have an older graphics card you might want to keep the aperture at 64-128MB.

There was an old rule of thumb that said the AGP aperture should be set to 1/2 your system memory, but that was back when system memory was 128 or 256MB and video cards had 16 or 32MB of RAM on them. I have a 128MB card and 512MB system RAM and my aperture is at 64MB. I think 64's a nice number so I put my AGP aperture there 🙂

 

[Jeff7]

What Inept said.🙂
I think AGP Aperature is just a relic from the beginning days of AGP, when high-end cards had 16MB of RAM, and mainstream ones used 4MB. Texture compression was pretty lousy at the time too, so AGP offered a link, over the system bus, to the system RAM to store textures there. Of course, video RAM was maybe 10-12ns in those days; now we've got 64MB+ of DDR RAM with <4ns access times, and improved compression methods.