What is apperture size?

[Tareq]

Excuse the ignorance, but what in the world is apperture size in the BIOS and how does it affect the system performance?

Are there any good guids to tweak the BIOS for AGP ?

[Livius]

Hi!
To my knowledge it refers to the amount of system memory that is available to the AGP. It should be set to at least 64MB for best system performance and stability.

[Jorden]

AGP Graphics Aperture Size is a chunk of the system memory (the normal RAM in your PC) made available to store 'memory mapped, graphics data structures'.

Or in normal Enlgish, there's no way the memory on your videocard can store massive 32bit graphics, so they're stored temporarily in a part of your system memory, before being transfered to your video-card memory.

For the G200 it's mostly set to 128Mb (yes, even if you're running with 32Mb to 64Mb of system memory. Then you are sure all the leftover memory is used for data-storage) and for the G400 and especially the MAX it's set to 256Mb (again, no matter what your physical memory is)

To tweak the BIOS for AGP, that depends on what kind of mobo you have. Some mobo's have a 'switch' in the BIOS that allows you to set it to AGP/PCI, which looks for a card in the AGP port before it looks at the PCI slots.

Hope this helped something?

Jorden.

[rickn]

Jorden: 3dfx uses that method of cacheing textures, but DIME is actually texturing polygons directly from system memory.

[Maggi]

Hi Rick,

3dfx cannot even do that ... they use the AGP port as if it were PCI ...

Maybe The DooDoo 4 or 5 have real AGP.

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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[rickn]

maggi: what I meant is that 3dfx uses system memory as cache, they do not use sidebanding or dime. So yes, they use the same thing as they would with pci, of course agp is faster than pci. AGP compliant cards can texture directly from your system memory.

[Alfie]

Wow, I'm glad you guys answered first
I was going to suggest unzipping your pants and look