Not sure if aperture is the right word (not at home now so cant look) but I was looking through my bios yesterday and it said the vga aperture size was set to 64mb. I have a 128 mb graphics card so should this be set to 128mb?
64MB is the default, regardless of the video card you use. 4MB video cards use a 64MB aperture. The aperture is "mapped memory" that acts like a buffer between the video card and the main system (CPU). It will take up address space in main memory, so you don't want it to be set too high. For performance reasons, you also don't want it set too low (32MB is low, 16MB is too low).
Search around on the net for aperture size in quotes. You'll get a ton of hits with explanations. ~cdogg
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein
I must say that I have experienced in the past issues with 3DMark and the aperture size set at 64Mb. Some games too.
I set the aperture to 128 and the issues disappeared. My graphics card was a vanilla GF3, now a GF4 Ti4400.
My system memory is 512Mb, so that might alleviate the space issue cdogg points out.
SmurfyUK, you do not state how much RAM you have on your system. It does count.
I have seen, on a tweaking site, benchmark tests that were run at the various aperture sizes. A lot of the test results show increased performance at 32MB and 128MB over the default 64MB. They also said below 32MB and above 128MB performance seriously dropped. Unfortunately I can't remember the site, I think it was something like tweak3d.com.
everyone,
Just be careful whenever you adjust the aperture size from the default 64MB. If you have an older operating system (Win95/98/ME), there is a flaw dealing with virtual memory - vcache. Increasing the aperture size on one of those OS's could use up the memory addresses rather quickly, regardless of the amount of RAM in the system. This doesn't apply to WinNT/2K/XP.
Remember, the system only uses the aperture mapping when the resources onboard the video card fall short. So if your card has at least 64MB of memory, chances that you'll need to adjust the aperture setting is rare.
amdbeast,
Here's that Tweak3D article I think you were talking about!
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