What?! I can change how much video memory I want???..

[semi]

I have a question. I have an EpoX EP-MVP4A mainboard. It is a k-6 2 450mhz with a built-in AGP 2D/3D graphics accelerator. I was looking through the manual and there was this section called "AGP Aperature size." It gave me instructions on "the amount of memory that the AGP card is allowed to share. So is the card turning my ram into video memory?? I mean it can go all the way up to 256. So is that good? So is that video memory or what? Because My pc now has 8 megs of video memory. Should I buy more ram and make the AGP Apeture size higher? I just want to know what it is. If it's video memory, then there's no point of buying a video card if I can bump it all the way up to 64 or something.

Also, What is the frame buffer size? It lets me specify the size of system memory to allocate for video memory. It can go from 1 to 8.

[Stoffie]

That's just the amount of RAM you can set the system to use when it's running out of texturing memory in 3D games and the such.
It's pretty slow though even with AGP 4x.
As far as I know and as far as I have experienced, it gives you zero extra performance.
Usually the aperture size is set the size of your RAM, but not much using setting it anything above 128 though.

Seems like, as you can set the framebuffer from 1 to 8 megs, that your so called videocard is using some of your RAM as videomemory, one of those crappy shared videosolutions. Aargh, just leave it to 8 for best performance.

[This message has been edited by Stoffie (edited 06-03-2000).]

[dfgsd]

my parents have one of those kinds of boards. it does share system memory for video. The highest it goes is 8. The video on these bascally sucks. If you are looking at a really good new video card you might want to upgrade motherboards because you probaly don't have an agp slot.

[semi]

Yea, I only have pci slots. For a minute there I thought I found a way to boost my vid. memory without getting a card!!! *argh* So close.....so do you guys not reccommend changing the AGP aperature. I have 64megs of ram. what if I upgrade my ram and then chagne the aperature???