AGP Appature guide...

[Tweb]

I found no difference with appature sizes between 32 to 256 meg except 3DMark crashes to desk top at 32 megs an below, but all other programs run down to 16 megs.

512 mb PC150 crucial no OC

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Originally posted by ND
Voodoo3/5 DO NOT support AGP TEXTURING, hence, setting apperture size for it is quite useless if not pointless
Voodoo4 DO.

Thanks ND, I thought I was alone on that.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Originally posted by AllGamer
now i'm really confused

AGP aperture it's simply a way of sharing system memory with the Video.

so i think that should work regardless of AGP or PCI as long as you are using AGP bridges in your AGP (PCI ) slot.

It is but its only for agp textures.... how would it have agp textures if it is pci....see what I mean. Same with the voodoo3/2/1. Its used for AGP cards cause it helps with the HUGE amounts of textures in todays high res. games. Chances are your pci card aint gonna do that high res. anyhow and still be playable just do tho the bus its on---pci. Besides most still say even on a real AGP card the agp aperture
will hardly if ever be used. And most times it is only used in theoretical benches and not real gaming and etc....

[Bigjakkstaffa]

...im now well and truly confused not to mentioned stumped by this whole AGP App. thing now... ... just set it to 128 and run like hell

--Jakk

[Dracas]

Hoya

I wasn't talking about AGP textures, just Textures in general, and large Data chunks, reguardless of AGP or PCI interface, the AGP appreture can still be set to make more memory available for virtual textures Mostly this option makes a bigger difference on AGP Pro slots (the Voltage upgraded 2x/4x slots, not 4x/8x)

a totally different fish from AGP textures

This option really normally doesn't make a lick of difference unless you're using a Professional GL card or want to do some hardcore rendering on your machine (for instance, Bryce/Truespace/3dsmax renders a bit faster with the Appreture set huge as compared to tiny, because theres more space to swap the big fricken textures)

Should make a big difference if you set your appreture big and turn your GeForce 2 into a Quadro 2

All in all though, its shared video memory. Since 1-4 MB is used for screen mode/resolution, that leaves the rest to texture and frame buffer. When you get into professional settings though, you need a lot more space for virtual texturing and things like displacement maps, volumetrics, etc

Hmm, willing to debate this some more, these are more just observations I've made - not entirely proven fact, only self-satisfactory reference - keeping an open mind

[grimfandango]

I am done here!!

I am settin it towhat Ifeel/performs best for my system..
thats all!!

[Dracas]

hehehehe O:-)

[pandaz3]

Well I'd read something on another site about a week ago and my setting had been 64. Using 2001SE to bench mark a few week ago I was just over 3500 with my Radeon 7200 card. I set it to 256 Aperture size and now I'm benching 4019. I have 768 RAM so I can afford it.

[AllGamer]

Originally posted by $1500-P4 gamer
Besides most still say even on a real AGP card the agp aperture
will hardly if ever be used. And most times it is only used in theoretical benches and not real gaming and etc....

and that's true
once your AGP really starts using the system memory the Scores Drops BIG
TIME, and i was able to test that.

[AllGamer]

Originally posted by pandaz3
I set it to 256 Aperture size and now I'm benching 4019. I have 768 RAM so I can afford it.

yeah, i can affort it too, i have 2 gig of ram

but you better hope that your games wont require more than what your Vid Card has on-board else your Speed will drop considerably alot to the point that it's poor.

althought inside the game you'll not even notice it, if you have a fast CPU

you'll only notice it in SCORES like 3DMarks

[Cazen]

OK - lots of good information, and really confusing as well.
So what would you recommend I run my Geforce2 MX400 64MB DDR AGP card in my 600Mhz Athlon system with 256 MB PC133 SDRAM. Primary use is for Autocad 2D drawing and Peps CAM 3D rendering.

[mannybj]

I have a PNY GeForce4 MX420 64MB and a ECS motherboard P6VXAT with 768MB memory. When I set the Apreture to anything over 32MB in the BIOS I get the following message when starting windows:
"While initializing device IOS: ERROR Real Mode System Memory Allocation Failed".
I cannot find any info as to how to fix this problem, I have set the VCACHE to under 512MB with no success. I look at MS Knowledge base and tried to reduce memory available to windows no good. The VIA Harware Forum tell me there is not fix, but no info on how it works.
Does anyone have a write up on what or how it works or how to fix this problem.
Thanks
Manny

[AllGamer]

Originally posted by Cazen
OK - lots of good information, and really confusing as well.
So what would you recommend I run my Geforce2 MX400 64MB DDR AGP card in my 600Mhz Athlon system with 256 MB PC133 SDRAM. Primary use is for Autocad 2D drawing and Peps CAM 3D rendering.

That will do just fine for the task you have in mind

Games are the only 3D graphical hogs in this arena

so nothing to worry about with ACAD or Pep CaM