Raising the Arpeture in Bio's does indeed help performance!

[Moegames]

I know some already know this..but i found this out on my own after a nite or two of monkeying around with the settings.

I been messing around with diffrent settings in-game and some settings for my vid card and pc for performance increase with FarCry. I noticed a day or so ago that raising the AGP Arpeture does make a nice diffrence. At first i thought i was just seeing things but after switching back to 128mb Arpeture then to 256 Arpeture many many times...i can now confirm it does make FarCry run better.

Now of course this may not be the same case for everyone as everyone's pc is quite diffrent but for me and what im running "see sig for specs" ..this does help raise my fps about 10-15 more fps.

I run the game at 1152x resolution, all in-game visual settings to maxx includeing water at Ultra High. AA in-game is LOW,AF is Tri/2x.

Desktop CP for my ATI card is all quality settings but AA and AF at APPLICATION PREFERENCE. I use 3Drage for my refresh rates. I get around 40-50fps in FarCry with it occasionally dropping frames in wierd spots but over all the game runs nice with how i have it.

Must admit, FarCry is truely the first of the Next-Generation pc titles.

http://www.dreamers-united.com/farcry.jpg

[This message was edited by Moegames on Fri March 26 2004 at 10:33 AM.]

[Moegames]

I know some already know this..but i found this out on my own after a nite or two of monkeying around with the settings.

I been messing around with diffrent settings in-game and some settings for my vid card and pc for performance increase with FarCry. I noticed a day or so ago that raising the AGP Arpeture does make a nice diffrence. At first i thought i was just seeing things but after switching back to 128mb Arpeture then to 256 Arpeture many many times...i can now confirm it does make FarCry run better.

Now of course this may not be the same case for everyone as everyone's pc is quite diffrent but for me and what im running "see sig for specs" ..this does help raise my fps about 10-15 more fps.

I run the game at 1152x resolution, all in-game visual settings to maxx includeing water at Ultra High. AA in-game is LOW,AF is Tri/2x.

Desktop CP for my ATI card is all quality settings but AA and AF at APPLICATION PREFERENCE. I use 3Drage for my refresh rates. I get around 40-50fps in FarCry with it occasionally dropping frames in wierd spots but over all the game runs nice with how i have it.

Must admit, FarCry is truely the first of the Next-Generation pc titles.

http://www.dreamers-united.com/farcry.jpg

[This message was edited by Moegames on Fri March 26 2004 at 10:33 AM.]

[JTTimmay]

who would have figured it would be one of the new guys.

Thanks
Timmay
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[gerwin_a]

Tried it and it works like a charm, got a good performance increase.

Now i only need to figure out my mouse lag problem ;-)

Thx very much

[Iaintnoho2]

How about a few instructions on increasing the AGP aperture for the computer-challenged? (like me!)

[Pip-Boy-Three]

Know what a bios is?

Incase you dont, ill explain that too, hehe

As you turn on your pc and get the memory test, it will say something like Press "KEY" to enter Setup/Bios. The key is diff from board to board, but normally escape or f2.

Search around in there, but dont change anything if you dont know what it is - settings in here can do things like frying pcs. Search for AGP Aperature size. I think for most boards it will be set to 64 meg by default.

[Moegames]

My AGP Arpeture in my bios is default at 128mb. The performance increase was gained when i went from 128mb to 256mb. I also tried 512mb but seen no diffrence then 256mb. So try 256mb AGP Apreture if you have alteast 512mb of system ram which im sure most of you guys have at the least..

http://www.dreamers-united.com/farcry.jpg

[This message was edited by Moegames on Fri March 26 2004 at 10:33 AM.]

[Sliqsta]

hmmm. I remember it being default at 64. I raised it to 128 a long time ago. Good find. I'm def. trying this out...

ASUS P4XP-X Mobo
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
Pentium 4 2.4GHz o/c'ed to 3.0
512 mb DDR RAM(PC2100)
Maxtor 80GB 10000 RPM HD
19" LCD

[johnny_twobears]

Here you go Iaintnoho2


AGP aperture size

This option selects the size of the AGP aperture. The aperture is a portion of the PCI memory address range dedicated as graphics memory address space. Host cycles that hit the aperture range are forwarded to the AGP without need for translation. This size also determines the maximum amount of system RAM that can be allocated to the graphics card for texture storage. AGP Aperture size is set by the formula : maximum usable AGP memory size x 2 plus 12MB. That means that usable AGP memory size is less than half of the AGP aperture size. That's because the system needs AGP memory (uncached) plus an equal amount of write combined memory area and an additional 12MB for virtual addressing. This is address space, not physical memory used. The physical memory is allocated and released as needed only when Direct3D makes a "create non-local surface" call.

The size of the aperture does not correspond to performance so increasing it to gargantuan proportions will not improve performance. Many graphics card, however, will require a larger than 8MB AGP aperture size to work properly so you will need to set a minimum of 16MB for the AGP aperture size. Even then, you should set the aperture size at a higher setting so that it will be large enough to accommodate any texture storage requirements that your games/applications may have. At the moment, the rule of the thumb is an AGP aperture size of about 64MB to 128MB. Increasing the AGP aperture size beyond 128MB wouldn't really hurt performance but it would still be best to keep the aperture size to about 64MB-128MB so that the GART table won't be too large. As the amount of onboard RAM increases and texture compression becomes commonplace, there's less of a need for the AGP aperture size to increase beyond 64MB. So, it's recommended that you set the AGP Aperture Size as 64MB or at most, 128MB.
but like moegames said raising it to 256 for far cry if it helps try it,, can't hurt...

[itzl0l]

i always think its funny when i read something like that saying that blah blah wont give an increase in performance. It wasnt long ago at all when every1 thought having a gig of ram was rediculous.

[TheArch]

As a general rule your AGP apeture size should be 2X your graphic card's RAM. . .

Ie 64MB card Apature = 128MB
128MB CARD = 256 MB Apature

[johnny_twobears]

true . lol so if i have a 256 card can i go up 2 x's that .... lol just kidding http://ubbxforums.ubi.com/images/smiley/16x16_smiley-happy.gif

[johnny_twobears]

lol i was kidding about going up on my 256 , i tried it and went to 512,, not bad... running smooth .. good performance http://ubbxforums.ubi.com/images/smiley/16x16_smiley-happy.gif