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AGP Aperture / TNT2 Pro (Read 921 times)
Jun 17th, 2004 at 2:04pm

Dan   Offline
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Anyone know what how I should tweak my BIOS's AGP aperture setting? Its at 64MB at the minute. And how can I tweak my NVIDEA RIVA TNT2 Model 64 Pro AGP card?
Thanks, Dan
 
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Reply #1 - Jun 17th, 2004 at 3:34pm

Dan   Offline
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Discussion of what AGP aperture is, how it works, and how much memory should be allocated to it:

Quote:
How big should I set AGP Aperture size in my BIOS?

First of all, AGP Aperture memory will not be used until your video card's on-board memory is running low. That means it will usually not impact your gaming performance because developers are trying hard to not exceed the on-board memory limits.
The bigger your video memory, the smaller your Aperture Size could be. However with later games requiring more and more texture memory a good number seems to be 128MB Aperture Size for all cards with 64 MB to 256 MB Video RAM.
Setting the Aperture Size to HUGE values will not increase performance because this merely sets the maximum amount of physical memory that can be used. It only makes the GART Table bigger because every 4K page has its own entry, no matter if allocated or not.
Setting the Aperture Size to too small values could result in running out of available texture memory especially on a low-mem video card. It is also possible that developers make use of the GART's features by creating textures as 'non-local'.

If you experience in-game stuttering try playing with the size of your Aperture.

What is it from a technical point of view?

When using an AGP card the video memory on the graphics adapter is mapped into the 4 GB memory address space (above the region of the physical installed memory). Any accesses to this memory region are directly forwarded to the video memory, greatly increasing transfer rates. However in earlier days of video cards graphics memory was rather limited and ran out quickly (a single 32-bit 512x512 MIP-mapped texture consumes ~1.5 MB) so AGP added a mechanism to use the system's main memory as additional storage for graphics data such as textures. This is what the AGP Aperture is. Usually directly below the mapped video memory the system reserves a contiguous space of addresses the size of your Aperture (no physical memory will be consumed at this time).
When free video RAM is running low the system dynamically allocates 4K sized pages of system memory for use as AGP Aperture Memory. The problem with this dynamic allocation is that in many cases the pages are spread in a non-contiguous form throughout the physical memory. Accessing these pages directly would hinder performance because of scattering/gathering requiring extra logic. To get around this limitation the GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table), which is implemented in hardware in the Northbridge’s Memory Controller Hub, provides an automatic physical-to-physical mapping between the scattered pages and the AGP Aperture. The actual usable amount of this 'virtual' AGP memory is less than half the AGP Aperture size set in the BIOS. This is because the Aperture is divided into two areas. One uncached half and another write-combined area.


Definition from http://www.ocfaq.com/.

That explains the first part, which just leaves how to tweak my card.
Dan  Wink
 
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Reply #2 - Jun 17th, 2004 at 6:57pm

Gixer   Offline
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Mine is set to 128.
 

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Reply #3 - Jun 18th, 2004 at 5:54am

Dan   Offline
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I have just set mine to that, and it seems Ok... I only have 128Meg SDRAM though!!  Sad
Dan
 
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Reply #4 - Jun 18th, 2004 at 1:57pm

Gixer   Offline
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Eeek, maybe leave it at 64 then.
 

AMD64 3500+ @ 2200MHz 400FSB&&MSI K8N Neo 2 mobo nForce3 chipset&&1gig Corsair XMS PC3200 timings @ 10.2.2.2 &&XFX 6800 Ultra @ 450/1200&&80gig HDD&&Loadsa fans!!!
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Reply #5 - Jun 18th, 2004 at 2:11pm

Dan   Offline
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I haven't had any problems.... yet!
Dan
 
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Reply #6 - Jun 19th, 2004 at 7:12am

Gixer   Offline
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well as long as it isnt causing any performance probs then leave it as it is  Grin
 

AMD64 3500+ @ 2200MHz 400FSB&&MSI K8N Neo 2 mobo nForce3 chipset&&1gig Corsair XMS PC3200 timings @ 10.2.2.2 &&XFX 6800 Ultra @ 450/1200&&80gig HDD&&Loadsa fans!!!
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