What does AGP apeture do?

[LOAF]

The subject pretty much is the question. What is AGP apeture and what does it do? I know where it is in my BIOS but I've never touched it. I have a G4 TI4600, so what's a good value for it to be set at?

 

[Peter]

In simple words, it is a window through which the AGP graphics device can borrow system RAM in case its own local RAM isn't enough to hold all the stuff required for the 3D scene to be rendered.

You want that to be large, but larger than half your system memory size obviously isn't useful. Note that the actual borrowing is dynamic, so making the window larger than needed doesn't do any harm.

regards, Peter

 

[LOAF]

Thanks! I have mine set to 64Mb, so I'm assuming that should be plenty in conjuction with the 128Mb my board already has.

On a side note: Just thinking for a second....my graphics board has 200 times the memory my first computer (IBM PS/2 Model 30) had. That just blows my mind to think how quickly times change. And also makes me laugh when I remeber what Bill Gates once said..."640K should be enough for anybody". Hehehe yeah right.

 

[MIGhunter]

Ok, so if I have a radeon 9700pro that has 128mb ram and my system has 1024mb of 1066 Rambus memory I can set my aperature to 256? Will that be an improvement? I remember a thread somewhere (I will see if I can find it) that showed most things didn't change on the various settings.