Increasing AGP Aperture Rate

[jonifen]

I have a Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra mobo which I want to set the AGP Aperture rate on to 256 or higher if possible. However, it is fixed at 128, and there is no option in the BIOS to change it.

Has anyone had this mobo and found out how to change it? Or at least know of somewhere which might help? Or can it not be changed at all?

I've still got a 32Mb gf2mx in my machine cuz I cant afford an upgrade for a while (spent nearly £1k on car insurance the other day ) and I could set the aperture rate on my old 440BX mobo to 256 which made D3D games run a lot smoother. GTA3 is running slightly sluggy at times (exactly how UT used to run on my old p3 machine) and I want to see if a higher aperture rate would help.

If you need the rest of the system specs, I am talking about the "jonz" machine in my sig.

Thanks in advance for any help

 

[Plexapotamus]

I don't know about your board but with my board this is how it works:
check to see if there is a setting that says System Performance
your choices will be Optimal or Turbo.
If it is set to turbo mode then your aperature size is auto set to 128 change to Optimal and you should be able to raise it up to 256.

Remember to also change your mem settings (CAS, RAS etc.) back to the lower values as they would have been set to in Turbo mode.

Read about aperature size here

 

[Evolution]

Originally posted by jonifen
I have a Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra mobo which I want to set the AGP Aperture rate on to 256 or higher if possible. However, it is fixed at 128, and there is no option in the BIOS to change it.

Has anyone had this mobo and found out how to change it? Or at least know of somewhere which might help? Or can it not be changed at all?

I've still got a 32Mb gf2mx in my machine cuz I cant afford an upgrade for a while (spent nearly £1k on car insurance the other day ) and I could set the aperture rate on my old 440BX mobo to 256 which made D3D games run a lot smoother. GTA3 is running slightly sluggy at times (exactly how UT used to run on my old p3 machine) and I want to see if a higher aperture rate would help.

If you need the rest of the system specs, I am talking about the "jonz" machine in my sig.

Thanks in advance for any help

Perhaps you should try to understand what AGP Apeture is before trying to modify it. It simply means that when your video card runs out of room to store textures, it will allocate some system ram for the extra textures of the application. Now obviously system ram is slower than video ram, so the the greater amount of space you need the slower the program will run. Although have a system apecture size of a certain size is benefial, I simply believe that if you use more than 128 mb for that card you'll be wasting time unless you have state of the art ram meaning dual ddr with the highest possible fsb or rdram with the same. So the bottom line... I think that all applications load all of the textures required into ram anyways, and if it were to run out of the allocated ram, wouldn't there be an error instead of a slow down? Anyways if you want better performance get a new card And considering that you're having problems with GTA3, I seriously doubt it will help.

BTW what settings are you using? Perhaps the problem is with your processor, ram or background apps instead?

 

[Plexapotamus]

Re: Re: Increasing AGP Aperture Rate

Originally posted by Evolution
the greater amount of space you need the slower the program will run.

I disagree, setting the aperature size to 128 says to the system that the Graphics card can use up to 128mb of system ram if it needs it.

If you graphics card is only going to require 30 - 40 megs of system RAM (like most games do) then having an aperature size of 128 is not going to boost performance over an aperature size of 64, but its not going to slow it down either because the unused ram isn't allocated to anything yet.

I posted this url already but it gives a lot of info about the AGP Aperature Size setting. Check it out.

~alex.

 

[Evolution]

are you actually sure it's not allocated completely? because if that wasn't the case, shouldn't everyone allocate their maximum amount possible? Also I was mentioning that the greater amount of system ram required the slower the game will go(compared to a vid card with the memory required), and this is the case due to memory transfer rates. That's why it's recommended just to get a larger memory card instead.

 

[Plexapotamus]

Now, while increasing the AGP aperture size beyond 128MB won't take up system RAM, it would still be best to keep the aperture size in the 64MB-128MB range so that the GART (Graphics Address Relocation Table) won't become too big. As the amount of local memory on graphics cards increases and texture compression becomes commonplace, there's less of a need for the AGP aperture size to grow beyond 64MB. Therefore, it is recommended that you set the AGP Aperture Size to 64MB or at most, 128MB.

So aparently it affects the GART. I don't know much about the GART so I'll google it and see what I find;

So called AGP memory is just dynamically-allocated areas of system memory, which the graphics controller can access quickly. The access speed comes from built-in hardware in the chipset which translates addresses, allowing the graphics controller and its software to see a contiguous space in main memory, when in fact the pages are disjointed. Thus the graphics controller can access large data structures like texture bitmaps (typically 1 KByte to 128 KByte) as a single entity. The built-in chipset hardware is called the GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table), similar in function to the paging hardware in the CPU.

So, the more system RAM you allocate to AGP Memory the more memory addresses have to be stored in the GART
Theoretically this will effect performance to a small degree, but I don't think this would be significant enough for it to be noticed in most common benchmarking apps, as the GART is actually built into the chipset.


The first quote was taken from the link that I have already posted twice. The second quote can be found here.

Also I was mentioning that the greater amount of system ram required the slower the game will go(compared to a vid card with the memory required), and this is the case due to memory transfer rates. That's why it's recommended just to get a larger memory card instead.

yes, but all graphics cards must load at least a minimum amount of data into AGP system ram. eg, if I had a graphics card with 512megs of memory (i wish) my aperature size must still be greater than 0 as some things must be stored in system memory.

 

[jonifen]

I meant to check the optimal/performance settings thing in my BIOS the other night but forgot :/

I do know what the AGP Aperture Rate is, and I had tested it thoroughly on my old P3 to see the differences. I noticed setting it to 256 (even when I only had 256Mb RAM) made a HUGE difference over setting it to 128 or 64. I can honestly say I have never noticed any performance decrease when testing, so the decrease must be very slight - but it could be that the pros outweigh the cons perhaps. Even when I tried following instructions on websites which recommended about half the size of the system memory, or double the graphics memory + 12mb, I found that just whacking it to 256 made the biggest improvement.

I know it will make a big benefit to performance on d3d games (perhaps not so much on OGL - because Q2/3 ran the same on the p3 machine with the aperture at 128 or 256). I know the way that GTA3 is glitchy on the 2nd island, that the graphics card is having trouble loading the textures into memory quick enough for them to be displayed smoothly... and I'm sure that if my graphics card was 64Mb, it surely wouldnt be so glitchy (but I cant afford a new graphics card unfortunately - so I would prefer to get this one working better).

Does anyone have the same mobo as me and come across a solution at some time? I keep finding plenty of information about the aperture rate, but none relating to my motherboard, so I'm guessing the problem is unresolvable :/

 

[Krux]

Re: Re: Increasing AGP Aperture Rate

Originally posted by Evolution
Perhaps you should try to understand what AGP Apeture is before trying to modify it. It simply means that when your video card runs out of room to store textures, it will allocate some system ram for the extra textures of the application. Now obviously system ram is slower than video ram, so the the greater amount of space you need the slower the program will run. Although have a system apecture size of a certain size is benefial, I simply believe that if you use more than 128 mb for that card you'll be wasting time unless you have state of the art ram meaning dual ddr with the highest possible fsb or rdram with the same. So the bottom line... I think that all applications load all of the textures required into ram anyways, and if it were to run out of the allocated ram, wouldn't there be an error instead of a slow down? Anyways if you want better performance get a new card And considering that you're having problems with GTA3, I seriously doubt it will help.

BTW what settings are you using? Perhaps the problem is with your processor, ram or background apps instead?

haha he has a geforce 2 mx 400 his system ram is WAY faster then his video's withh all of its 133mhz greatness unless its a DDR one and I doubt they even made a DDR MX. so no your wrong in telling him IN THIS CASE that it would slow him down. now had he had something faster like a TI500 or a geforce 4 then yes you would be 100% right. so his logic in this case is more "correct" then yours

 

[jonifen]

Krux... its a 2MX/200 - even worse i spose lol.

the card is fine for pretty much everything else, but it just doesnt like GTA3 :/

 

[Krux]

well you know I was just saying that your ram is alot faster on your mobo then on your video card so the other guys point was moot (in this case) and that if textures did happen to spill over into your system ram then you wouldn't take a performance hit.

 

[jonifen]

Originally posted by Krux
well you know I was just saying that your ram is alot faster on your mobo then on your video card so the other guys point was moot (in this case) and that if textures did happen to spill over into your system ram then you wouldn't take a performance hit.

i know

just had to correct you though... you were complimenting my graphics card by saying it was a mx/400 when its only an mx/200

 

[Evolution]

Re: Re: Re: Increasing AGP Aperture Rate

Originally posted by Krux
haha he has a geforce 2 mx 400 his system ram is WAY faster then his video's withh all of its 133mhz greatness unless its a DDR one and I doubt they even made a DDR MX. so no your wrong in telling him IN THIS CASE that it would slow him down. now had he had something faster like a TI500 or a geforce 4 then yes you would be 100% right. so his logic in this case is more "correct" then yours

The Hercules MXs have DDR...I know this for a fact since I have a 3D Prophet II MX. Not to mention wouldn't it take more time to read and write to the system ram since it isn't integrated?

 

[jonifen]

I didnt think that the hercules card has DDR memory, so I had a little look into it, and found this...

http://europe.hercules.com/supportf.php?pa=faq&i=1410354443&a=2&p=5

 

[Taurus]

yeah, most low-end cards with ddr actually have 64-bit ddr... which is equivalent to normal 128-bit sdr.

 

[jonifen]

aye, i remember seeing that somewhere... must be why hercules use SDR because it would work out being better than using DDR (as the link above says)

 

[jonifen]

Update:

I think I've worked out how to change aperture rate etc in the BIOS on my motherboard afterall. Check out the post here - http://www.ntfs.org/forum/showthread.php?postid=310552#post310552

(I'm posting it here incase people are looking for a solution to a similar/same problem)