Access said:
This should be set to the half of your amount of system RAM
Why, exactly? Please be technical.
The AGP aperture size is the maximum amount of memory that the graphics card
can "borrow" to use for texture memory. It's slower than on-card memory,
but (usually) faster than having the drivers clear a memory area on the card
and copy from regular memory to the card. You can safely set it to as much
as you like, with the caveat that if a game or other graphics program
allocates it all, and then your system needs more memory for other things,
disk swapping might occur. You can also safely set it to as small as you
like, with the caveat that a really memory-craving game or graphics program
might run out of texture memory, and either report so, or introduce small
pauses while clearing out and copying to the graphics card memory.
I'd take a look at how much memory there is on your graphics card, and set
the aperture size accordingly, based on the max requirements of the programs
you run. Few programs today require more than 128MB, so if you have a
Parhelia (this was crossposted to alt.comp.periphs.videocard.matrox), you
can leave it at a small setting. If you have a 32MB card, you might want to
set it to 128MB (if main memory allows). 256MB would be unneccessary in
almost all situations, and might just slow you down if a game tries to
pre-fill all available texture RAM -- that memory is almost certainly better
spent for disk cache.
Also, the speed of your main memory might be an issue -- if you have slow
SDRAM or single-channel DDR, you might want to avoid main memory use as much
as possible, and set the aperture size lower than if you have RDRAM or
dual-channel DDR.
Regards,
) but only paint/photo