How important is AGP aperture size?

[General Porkov]

I know this may or may not be a dumb question, but how much of an effect does changing the size of a PC's AGP aperture have on graphics and general performance?

I am currently using a PC with Windows XP Pro, 1,300MHz Duron, 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory, 80GB 7,200rpm ATA 100 Hard Drive, GeForce 4 MX 440 Graphics card (64MB AGP 4X) + MSI KT3 Ultra 2 board.

I started off with 256MB of RAM and AGP aperture 128MB, then I was advised to knock the aperture down to 64MB due to Windows XP using a lot of memory. So, I took it down to 64MB.

Then, I got an extra 256MB of RAM, as the price was low at the time (£26, compared to £64 when I got the first 256MB). I've kept the AGP aperture at 64MB, even at 512MB of system RAM.

So, if I planned to increase the AGP Aperture on the system to 128MB from 64MB, would that have any effect on the system graphics or general performance (better or worse) or does it not make any difference? I'd rather not increase the aperture size if it will decrease performance

Doom Lord General Porko Porkov
KA-BOOM!

[g]

After reading the following article, I don't think it really matters a whole lot what you have it set to once it's above a certain point...

http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/aperture-size/

As ever, the moral seems to be test it and see what works best.

[teamonkey]

I've got a 64MB card, so I set my AGP aperture to 64MB, but it doesn't seem to have any real effect.

I think more important than aperture size is the AGP bus speed. That's the rate at which data and instructions can be sent from RAM to the Video RAM on your graphics card.

[Valen_gr]

yeah, size is not that important when you are talking in these amounts of memmory.Tweaks to get the freq. up will make the chip run faster and hotter, if you really need performance, get a good fan and push it.
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