Turbo OpenGL and AGP Aperture

[Indigo]

I have seen in several places, including Matrox FAQ, that in order to fully utilize the Turbu driver speed, AGP Aperture should be set to 256. Now, I thought this setting depended on the size of the memory in the PC? Also, not everyone can fiddle around with this type of BIOS parameter due to mobo
limitations. So how come they (Matrox) base their driver speed on this?

[Gurm]

The driver speed isn't based on the AGP aperture. It merely seems that way. The problem is that AGP aperture is incorrectly implemented in a vast majority of motherboards. Some boards require you to turn it down to something reasonable like 32 megs in order to run correctly. Others require that it be no more than half of your total RAM. Yet others only run efficiently if the aperture is set to 256. These latter boards are the most numerous, which is why the FAQ's all say to set the aperture that way. In a perfect world, we'd all set our aperture to whatever made sense.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Maggi]

Well said, Gurm !

and it doesn'T even matter if you have only 128MB installed.

I had that config for quite a while and the result was a texture memory total of ~130MB.



I don't know though what happens if you have less mem than 128MB, but it wouldn't damage your hardware, so it is worth a try.

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Maggi

... sigh ... my third account in this BBS ...

[PeTe]

Well i have 128Mb memory, with 64 APG aperture size Q3 would no work.. ( actually it would work but with HUGE texture errors ) just turned it to 256 and Q3 was FINE. So it really means something with the TurboGL drivers. So just pump it up to 256mb.

Pe-Te

[exG-man]

I have 256 mb ram and a Max with current (541, not 550b) and latest TurboGl. I had my aperture set at 128 for the longest time, mainly because I didn't know what to set it at. When I went to download the newest TurboGL I noticed the suggestion to go to 256 mb on aperture. Made one helluva difference. Now I watch the forum's (fori ?)way more to pick up tips.

[Scytale]

It seems that the W2K beta driver ignores the BIOS AGP setting altogether...

[MultimediaMan]

Regarding Abit and Gigabyte motherboard AGP apertures settings:

Abit motherboards *seem* to max out at 64 MB, according to Entech's Powerstrip v2.55a, I've only checked out oneadapter on these boards (Matrox Marvel G200-TV w/ 16 MB RAM).

Gigabyte boards do not have a user-adjustable AGP aperture (I've not seen one with the GA-MGA400 adapter and the integrated BIOS feature yet) per se. In order for you to get AGP 2x and texture memory support, you do need to make sure both your Video BIOS and RAM are Shadowed in the BIOS menu. The AGP aperture size reported by the Powerstrip always seems to equal 2x the adapter RAM, when the BIOS is setup in this way. Any other way, and the Powerstrip reports the AGP transfers have been disabled.




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My (Current) Primary system:

Abit BE6 (PL BIOS)
P3 450
384MB PC-100 SDRAM (Non-ECC)
Matrox Marvel G200-TV AGP (NTSC) v2.6 BIOS
3Com 905B-TX NIC
SBlive (W/ OD I/O Card, Liveware 3.0 + Update)
ADS Cadet Radio Data AM/FM Card (8 Bit ISA)
3x WD AC28400 EIDE HDDs (ATA66 Enabled)
Creative DVD5241E EIDE 5x DVD-ROM
M/S Windows 98SE (English)
DirectX 7

My (Current) Secondary system

Data General/ ALR 2650 Mobo (v6.004 BIOS)
P2 350 (Non-SMP)
256 MB PC-100 SDRAM (ECC)
3 x Number9 Revolution 3D 8 MB PCI Adapters
Adaptec 6901 10BT NIC
Onboard Adaptec 2940 U2W
Onboard Intel 82558 NIC
Onboard Cirrus Logic SVGA adapter (Disabled)
Creative ModemBlaster 5601 Data/Voice/Fax Modem (ISA)
Creative AWE64 Gold
2x WD 4.5 GB Enterprise SCSI3 HDD
Nakamichi MJ-5 CD-Changer SCSI2
Panasonic LK-MW602 CD-R
2x Nakamichi MBR 7
Windows 98SE
DirectX 7

Tertiary system:
Dell Inspiron 7100 Laptop