Aperture Size & Fast Write

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tmlim

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What should I set my Aperture size to? And should I enable Fast Write?
ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB (on a 4x AGP connection)
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
Mobo: ASUS A7V266-E

"A delayed game will eventually come out, a bad game is bad forever."
-Shigeru Miyamoto
 
W

Willamette_sucks

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128 or 256 and yes.

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too;)
Rachel:): why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?
 
eden

eden

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:eek:

ENABLE Fast Writes?

You heretic! :tongue:

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eden

eden

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256MB and NO!

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W

Willamette_sucks

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Lol Eden... why no? I say Enable it and if it gives you any problems (stability issues) then disable it.

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too;)
Rachel:): why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?
 
eden

eden

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That's better. :wink:

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T

tmlim

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What does Fast Writes do for performance? ie anything significant?

"A delayed game will eventually come out, a bad game is bad forever."
-Shigeru Miyamoto
 
W

Willamette_sucks

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Fast Writes allows the graphics card to directly access the RAM, instead of going through the CPU. It can increase performance a bit, but it dosn't do much if anything on modern systems. Try it on and off and bench it, then based on that and stability, make your choice.

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too;)
Rachel:): why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?
 
J

jaraju

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Got this from Slava's post:
<i> 1. AGP Aperture size (also known as Graphics Window Size) is the amount of system RAM that will be used by the video card in addition to its own memory. In simple terms, if your video card has X Mb of memory, why not add another Y Mb of system memory to it? The optimal size of AGP Aperture depends on the amount of your system RAM and the more RAM you have, the more you can set in AGP Aperture.

If your VGA card has LESS than 128 Mb of memory I recommend the following AGP-A sizes:

- 1000Mb of RAM – set Aperture to 64 - 256Mb.
- 512Mb of RAM – set Aperture to 64 - 128Mb
- 256Mb of RAM – set Aperture to 32Mb or none at all

If your card has 128 Mb of memory or more set Aperture to 4 - 32Mb </i>

So, if i have a 128MB Card and a 512MB system memory, i should set my Aperature Size to only 32MB right?
 
eden

eden

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I don't think that makes sense at all. You should have MUCH more than 32MB, especially in DOOM III's case (which I gather AGP Aperture affects performance this time, by more than usual, which is usually little to nothing).
It's usually 1/4rth of system RAM BTW.

BTW he got the 1000MB RAM wrong, it's 1024. :wink: [/pedantic bastard]

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eden

eden

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I never understood why graphics card reviewers never gave us benchmarks for unusual things, like hidden BIOS features. It boggles my mind a lot, to be honest!
People talk about Fast Writes, Side Band Addressing, AGP Aperture, yet so little ever try features once advertised on the box! (IIRC Fast Writes was, on the GF2)
At least we'd know if there were stability problems encountered and their overall opinion on whether we should enable them or not, and whether the performance increase is worth that compromise, if there is one to be done.

If I were a reviewer, I'd try to cater to enthusiasts' desires a little bit more, honestly. No offense to Lars though.

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<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.php" target="_new">The THGC Photo Album revision Eden, faster updated than ever before!</A><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Eden on 08/13/04 00:09 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
eden

eden

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BTW I am still wondering why does the video card even need specifying of the Aperture usage limit. I mean, it just should be able to fetch it when it has to! I was always thinking cards just fetch when they have to, the amount needed, especially in modern cards, no need to "program" them.

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T

tmlim

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I guess the bottom line is just for me to try it and see how it works. Doom 3 will definitly be the game of choice to test it on. BTW, awesome game!

And it seems like Fast Write OFF is a better choice for ATI cards.

"A delayed game will eventually come out, a bad game is bad forever."
-Shigeru Miyamoto
 
Terracide

Terracide

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The test I have seen on 128 and above MB GFX cards show no (under ~2%) difference regardless of the AGP Aperture settings...

Terracide...

Don't pretend - BE!
 
T

tmlim

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Also, does the aperture size matter considering 8x or 4x AGP? I unfortunately still have 4x AGP.

"A delayed game will eventually come out, a bad game is bad forever."
-Shigeru Miyamoto
 
eden

eden

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Naw it doesn't. It shouldn't, theoretically speaking, and realistically too, because no game IIRC even uses AGP 8X entirely, let alone AGP4X.

I hear running a 9700PRO on AGP4X yeilds virtually no difference. I think THG tested it before.

Definitely up it. A total of 128MB fetches from memory to the AGP bus just isn't going to ruin much at all.
I got AGP4X anyways and use 128MB.

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<font color=red><A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.php" target="_new">The THGC Photo Album revision Eden, faster updated than ever before!</A></font color=red><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Eden on 08/14/04 02:28 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
eden

eden

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Oh yeah I know, I saw it. But I was saying that in relation to DOOM III above all. Who knows, maybe that game finally does use the Aperture more.

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B

Blizzard2

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Yeah, I don't think it makes any sense either. I actually followed this advise. I have Geforce 6800GT with 256, so i figured, I'll use 32mb as it's the minimum and recommended by the post. Most games ran ok. But warhammer 40k, dawn of war did not. I played it with full details and 4xAA and 8xAF in 1280*1024. And it was REALLY slow. Especially the campaign intro and when there was a lot of units on the screen. It messured 3fps at worse in the intro, looked as fast as the cpu test in 3d mark 2005.

My friend got some 40+ fps with 1024*768 with the same card and details and a just slightly faster CPU. Dropping all details to medium helped a lot. But I got the same improvement when I changed the aperture size to 256mb. It made the game over 10 times faster with highest details. So don't follow this advise on the page!

And why do they recommend AGP Transfer Mode: 1x?
Isn't faster better??
 
B

Blizzard2

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Yeah, I think that if the game needs more memory than your card has, you need to increase AGP memory or lower the details. Oc course AGP memory is slower than onboard memory.
But having too little memory seems drop the speed much more.
 
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