What is your AGP Aperture Size?

eatingrich · May 29, 2008, 04:26 PM

Hey folks,

I'm tweaking my system a bit because I have destructive tendancies and this sort of thing always ends up with me ruining my PC.

Anyway

what is your AGP Aperture Size? All the guides I read are from a few years back when big graphics cards were 64MB, nowadays 256MB and up is the norm, so do we still need the standard 64MB Aperture size? Or should we be on 128 or 256MB aperture because we have so much RAM these days and games are so graphics intensive?

So - what do you have it set to?

My graphics card is a 256MB 7300GT Nvidia and I have 1GB RAM.

Cheers!

Nick0323 · May 29, 2008, 05:45 PM

It used to be 128 but then I installed an X-Fi sound card and my graphic card went bonkers, turning it up to 256 done the trick. all in all it just controls how much resources your agp graphic card gets. With something like a HD3850 AGP its worth juicing it up.

CDsDontBurn · May 29, 2008, 07:55 PM

i have mine set to the max, 256MB. system runs like a champ

eatingrich · May 30, 2008, 03:32 AM

Interesting stuff, cheers guys. I figured it would either be rendered irrelevant or become a good way of speeding up your system given the intense games nowadays.

I think I'll run 3DMark and Morrowind with FPS showing before and after to see if I notice any difference!

CDsDontBurn · May 30, 2008, 09:29 AM

cool. let us know the results

eatingrich · May 30, 2008, 09:44 AM

Well - quite bizarre in some respects.

I ran 3DMark2001, which is the latest version I have, and the first score was 8324 and when repeated 8100. Then after increasing the aperture size from 64MB to 256MB it was 8280 and repeated on 8050.

So approx. 50 less each time. Not a huge difference but noticeable.

However, when playing Morrowind I'm sure it ran smoother, but I can't be sure. The thing with testing in games is there are variables that cause you doubt. For instance when outside there may be more figures around causing the CPU to work harder than another time you were testing it out.

So this time inside buildings (not as much distance to draw) I felt it ran much faster. Outside however was in a built up area with lots going on and it was just as slow, or normal, as before, if not slightly slower - but I felt that this was more because of effects and NPCs wandering about sucking up more juice.

So - I guess at worst its stayed the same and at best its slightly better in places, which would recommend leaving it at 256MB.

But I'm still concerned about the 3D Mark 2001 score. I wonder if its too old though, and more modern games like Morrowind (which still sucks up processor power now despite being 6 years old) make more use of the Aperture?

Let me know your thoughts!

CDsDontBurn · May 30, 2008, 10:21 AM

try running 3Dmark03 or 05 then. Newer than 01, but not nearly as intensive as 06 would be.

eatingrich · May 31, 2008, 05:47 AM

Yeah it did occur to me that if newer games used more aperture size then 01 might be out of date. It's the only one I have however. I'm going to re-run it and set the test to high detail and so on, try make it a bit more intensive and see if the difference in scores remains the same.

CDsDontBurn · May 31, 2008, 09:32 AM

here's a direct link to 3Dmark03 for you. it's a 178MB file, so it may take some time to d/l. you might also want to consider getting the patch which affects many different Futuremark tests.