Possible flat Texture fix for AGP users

[Dogtags 0]

For weeks now I was frustrated at the texture issue I was getting in game and after reading so many threads in different forums and trying to change all settings possible in all combinations it ended up not being this at all.

I finally decided to take a look at the BIOS setting on my motherboard. Now I have not touched my BIOS on the motherboard ever so it was default basically. I found an AGP arpeture setting which went from 64MB to 512MB. Not being 100% sure if this was supposed to match my video card memory or not I decided to change it to 128mb which is what my video card has.

Well the transformation is unbelieveable. I do not get the texture issue any longer. It was persistant before the change and after playing for around 6 hrs it has not appeared at all and boy the game is so nice now.

Anyway I recommend that anyone with AGP and texture issues look at this setting in your BIOS.

[bob1787 0]

i think its extra VRAM using from your system memory to store textures that arent being used much, handy for ArmA . i know i dont have aperture on my CMOS settings but i remember reading somewhere about GART mapping,i definately remeber seeing that somewhere in there, hmmm hmmm hmmm

[4 IN 1 0]

@bob1787 orthrough i am not sure, but i know that its not about the thing you talk about

AGP arpeture size setting

most ppl forgot how important to set this part correctly to get best perforemce on AGP card

PCI-E dont have this setting through

[Garbol 0]

sooo if i get this right. I must set my settings to 256MB (7600GS 256MB) to get best preformance on ArmA and maybe other games... man i hope my card wont overheat :P

[thr0tt 12]

Garbol, no, and it has nothing to do with overclocking or overheating your card.

I think the majority of people when this subject is brought up seem to stick with 128mb which appears to be optimum for most systems.

Best thing to do is google it and read the thousands of varying results in changing this figure. Next you may go on to the latency tool

[bravo 6 0]

my card has 512mb ddr3 AGP,

what you suggest me to do in order to improve?

im bios i dont have option/setting 512mb, it only goes to 256mb.

[Dogtags 0]

I am not sure what the arpature value does, all I know is I raised it from 64mb to 128mb and all of my texture problems have gone for good. I don't think it will help performance greatly but I also don't think it will hurt to try changing it either, give it a go and see.

[4 IN 1 0]

as far as i know, it wont give a sudden rise of FPS,

instead it would fix many GFX problems such as broken texture, broken poly, messed up 3d rendering etc

[bob1787 0]

AGP aperture (aperture = hole/slot) is how much memory GART will allow your graphics card to "overflow" into once your AGP memory is full or isnt using a texture very much

PCI-E cards have this by default which is why your won't see an aperture option in your CMOS on a PCI-E board (that doesnt have an AGP slot), the option that i saw was GART error reporting, didnt help me though

[Bad Pilot 0]

I've got 512MB DDR3 AGP and I've pretty much decided that an aperture of 128MB is optimum on my system. I say my system - but that's really two computers, as I've upgraded my Athlon XP 3000+ to an Athlon 64 2800+ a few weeks ago and the 128MB setting was best on both.

F

[thr0tt 12]

I've got 512MB DDR3 AGP and I've pretty much decided that an aperture of 128MB is optimum on my system.  I say my system - but that's really two computers, as I've upgraded my Athlon XP 3000+ to an Athlon 64 2800+ a few weeks ago and the 128MB setting was best on both.

F

Hey, I upgraded my XP3000+ a couple of weeks back too but to a Athlon 64 4000+, only £100 for mobo / proc / Icecool fan (big sucker).

My vote is 128mb.

[BraTTy 0]

AGP aperature allows you to set up to half of your system ram.SO if you have 1 gig RAM you can go upto 512m.

I have found in the past some games have a problem when it is set high.UT had a Direct3d bug and would lock up usually within a minute of gameplay forcing users to sometimes go as low as you can (i've gone as low as 2mb...but depends on your bios)

OFP also sometimes needed your AGP aperature lowered.

Higher is better performance, lower is less buggy

I've always tried to match my video card also (128 mb video card, 128 mb aperature)

In the old days Half your video card memory was recommended (64mb video card, 32mb aperature)

[bravo 6 0]

so if you have:

512mb video card => aperture 256mb

256mb video card => aperture 128mb

[BroK3n 0]

My mobo's a PCI-E one and there are no AGP slots for the gfx card. However there is that AGP aperture setting thing in the bios. I find this conflicting with the "only if you have an AGP card would this work" thing.

Could someone explain?

[bravo 6 0]

i think you can change it to pci (not sure)

[BroK3n 0]

Nah i cant. But i did find one called "PCI latency timer" and had the same values as the AGP ones that were mentioned.

Changed it to half my VRAM (to 128) and Arma is running at 70FPS, max, 30fps in bushes.

Granted, the LOD bug is still there but it doesnt take much of a performance hit now. It doesnt drop to 8fps like i had yesterday.

[Rexxenexx 0]

Brok3n, you most likely have an on-board graphics "chip" otherwise you shouldn't see AGP anything since you have an PCI-E card. It's actually an embedded AGP graphics card (assuming I'm correct). You should have a setting to disable the on-board video. The PCI latency timer is actually the timing for the PCI components. If you make it high then you'll slow down the PCI bus. It's an up/down deal which you should probably leave it default if you start running into probs.

Here is a copy/paste of a better description:"If the latency timer is set too low, PCI devices will interrupt their transfers unnecessarily often, hurting performance. If it's set too high, devices that require frequent bus access may overflow their buffers, losing data."

[thr0tt 12]

http://www.tweak3d.net/joomla/features/hardware/agp-aperture-size-examined

Interesting article.

[Dwarden 1125]

most of these AGP articles were outdated as chipsets and GPU, drivers quality increased ...

usually best results were VRAM == AGP aperture size

yet sometimes on older chipsets was less more stable ...

on high quality chipsets You can easily set higher value (e.g. 256MB VRAM and 512MB Aperture) w/o any issue

tho You need to realize in moment VRAM is full then application will use Aperture (decreasing free RAM) which is way slower than VRAM (exception low grade lowend cards with just DDR/DDR2) ...

so test this Yourself, use application like ATI Tray Tools or RivatTuner to monitor VRAM/texture memory usage...

compare with stability and speed (e.g. if You use way too high textures and fill VRAM too fast then often loading textures from aperture may degrade perf)

optimal situation ?

2-3GB system RAM

512MB VRAM (or higher)

512MB Aperture

[BigToe 0]

I increased the setting to 256 and the performance is great now with the demo on high and the highest resolution.

P4 3.2 mhz

3 gigs. ocz

ati x 1950 iceq agp 512gddr3

sound blaster audigy 2zs

Was a 9800 xt 256 and had problems running.

[bravo 6 0]

does this have anything about the handle leak?

I was playing evo tonight and i had 223,400 handle leak! No wonder why my game sucks!

Can i do anything to improve my game?

will this help the problem?

edit: typo

[mr_centipede 31]

god bless the OP.

now i no longer have that smashed glass gfx (or whatever it was called) when moving around cities and i can also set my texture settings higher than normal

never messed aroung with bios before. once again, thank you to OP