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Grape Flavor
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AGP Aperture help!

Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:15 pm

Ok, so I'm going through the BIOS on this old system, and if I once knew what the heck to do with the AGP Aperture size, I don't anymore. But there's a newer videocard in this system and this is important, right?

Someone with a good memory for old tech here to help me out? I googled it but I still don't know what to do. This is a 1GB graphics card on a system with 768MB of system RAM, if that helps. My options for AGP Aperture are 32MB up to 256MB.

lolling at the time warp scenario is okay, but real advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks guys.
 
Captain Ned
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Re: AGP Aperture help!

Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:22 pm

Grape Flavor wrote:
Ok, so I'm going through the BIOS on this old system, and if I once knew what the heck to do with the AGP Aperture size, I don't anymore. But there's a newer videocard in this system and this is important, right?

Someone with a good memory for old tech here to help me out? I googled it but I still don't know what to do. This is a 1GB graphics card on a system with 768MB of system RAM, if that helps. My options for AGP Aperture are 32MB up to 256MB.

lolling at the time warp scenario is okay, but real advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks guys.

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/ove ... vidcard/43

Since you've got more VRAM than system RAM, set the aperture for the minimum size.

EDIT: AGP Aperture was a way to work around the 32MB of VRAM on early GFX cards by shoving some of the stuff into system RAM. With 1GB on the card you clearly don't need that. Good stuff to know for old DOS Box gamers.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
Grape Flavor
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Posts: 269
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Re: AGP Aperture help!

Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:40 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
Grape Flavor wrote:
Ok, so I'm going through the BIOS on this old system, and if I once knew what the heck to do with the AGP Aperture size, I don't anymore. But there's a newer videocard in this system and this is important, right?

Someone with a good memory for old tech here to help me out? I googled it but I still don't know what to do. This is a 1GB graphics card on a system with 768MB of system RAM, if that helps. My options for AGP Aperture are 32MB up to 256MB.

lolling at the time warp scenario is okay, but real advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks guys.

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/ove ... vidcard/43

Since you've got more VRAM than system RAM, set the aperture for the minimum size.

EDIT: AGP Aperture was a way to work around the 32MB of VRAM on early GFX cards by shoving some of the stuff into system RAM. With 1GB on the card you clearly don't need that. Good stuff to know for old DOS Box gamers.


So 32MB would give me the best performance then? For what it's worth, this system is driving mid-2000s games on a 1920x1200 display, so that 1GB of VRAM might get more use than you might think.
 
Captain Ned
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Re: AGP Aperture help!

Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:51 pm

Grape Flavor wrote:
So 32MB would give me the best performance then? For what it's worth, this system is driving mid-2000s games on a 1920x1200 display, so that 1GB of VRAM might get more use than you might think.

I think. Hobbling the CPU by stealing system RAM certainly isn't going to help framerates.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
ludi
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Re: AGP Aperture help!

Sat Oct 27, 2012 11:27 pm

Grape Flavor wrote:
So 32MB would give me the best performance then? For what it's worth, this system is driving mid-2000s games on a 1920x1200 display, so that 1GB of VRAM might get more use than you might think.

Naw, do the math. As a rough estimate:

1920 x 1200 = 2,304,000 pixels

2,304,000 x 32bpp = 73,728,000 bits per frame

73,728,000 bits /8 bits per Byte / 1024 bytes per kB /1024 kB per MB = 8.79 MB per frame

Now crank up the triple buffering and everything else, and throw in the wireframes and other miscellaneous stuff the GPU is handling, and your video memory requirement is still pretty small, under 100MB most likely. Most of the other video memory, if even used in its entirety, will be storing textures. And if it is used up with textures, you surely do not want to hobble a system with just 768MB of RAM by dedicating some of that to video work. As the Cappy says, it will just bog down the CPU, which in turn will force the system to shift more of the routine memory work to swap buffer on the hard disk. Totally counterproductive.
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