AGP Aperture Size: HIGH or LOW?

I recently came across something that has been bugging me for a while now and I would like to hear what you guys think about this.

The AGP Aperture Size may be adjusted in BIOS and when I bought my new system the guy recommended to use half of my system RAM as AGP Aperture size. Being memory solely dedicated to the graphics card this seemed to make sense, especially when gaming, thus I always had it at 512 Mb.

But on the other hand one may say that the rest of the system now only has half (512 Mb) of the RAM available. I'm running XP-PRO-SP2 and never really had issues concerning system speed so I never really had a reason to question my settings.

I have an ATI 9800XT card with 256 Mb RAM. It seems to perform quite well with the extra 512 Mb, but I'm hearing more and more ppl saying that it's better for overall performance to keep AGP Aperture Size lower at e.g. 128 Mb.
For the GART (Graphics Address Relocation Table) it's said to actually improve performance when the AGP Aperture Size is lowered.

Anybody?

/NL

 

Most game developers try not to exceed onboard memory in designing games. The aperture size only determines the max that will be used if the onboard memory runs out---often not used at all.

It seems that a good conservative setting is 128. Setting it too high won't improve performance, but too low could hinder performance.

You could try 256, but if there are any problems rendering textures, go back to 128. As I said, 128 is probably a good all-round choice.