Back in December of 2002, I wrote an article on AGP aperture size and ever sense I finished it, I have wanted to re write it.  Instead I decided to write a new article and see if I got the same results with completely different system specs.

Probably one of the most confusing things associated with 3D performance is AGP aperture size. Some people say to make it the same size as your video memory and others say max it out. Well we are going to get to the bottom of it here and find out what works best.

The AGP aperture setting specifies to the north bridge how much of a PC's system memory is addressable by an AGP video card for textures after the video card has used all of its video memory. In that case, if you have 128Mb video card and your game textures never exceeds 128MB then you will never even use the AGP aperture.  I believe this is why testing is so hard on this subject.

• ASUS A7N8x Deluxe
• AMD Athlon XP 2400+
• 512Mb PC3200 (2 X 256 Dual channel)
• 60Gb Maxtor ATA133 7200RPM w/ SATA Adaptor
• MSI Geforce 4 TI 4280 128Mb (Det. 41.09)

• 3DMark 2001
• 3DMark 2003
• Code Creatures
• GL Mark
• Dronz Mark

• Return to castle Wolfenstein
• Unreal 2003
• Comanche 4