help with aperature and shared mem. settings

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by jaberwockey, Apr 27, 2006.

  1. jaberwockey

    jaberwockey Member

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    Hi all!
    Once again I need assistance from the masters here.
    Ok, I need a new PSu, but it is working quite fine after a bit of windows fixes and axing SP2.
    My dilemma is setting the aperature for the GPU and shared memory.
    As you see I have 1 Gb of RAM. I have set my aperature @ 256 and my shared memory @ 128 is this a good setting and can someone explain why? Should I drop the shared memory down? I read you should put it 1/2 or your RAM for the aperature. Is this true? Thanx all I need a little help.
     
  2. wolf68k

    wolf68k Member Guru

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    There is no magical number to set it to. If you do a Google search you'll see that each of the reviews doing a test of the different sizes and each using a different game to test with, all got very different results varring from game to game.
    Some games like big Apature size while others seem to prefer a smaller size.

    As near as i can figure it 64MB or 128MB seems to be the favored size of most games.


    Shared memory should only be if you're using on-board video so you can disable this.
     
  3. jaberwockey

    jaberwockey Member

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    Ok, that sounds like great advice and it was quite easy to follow and why. :)
    I guess I had the full idea of each game needing different aspects already by trial and error. Thank you for confirming my belief there.
    Now, another question in reagards to shared memory.
    If I have it set pretty high when not needed at all then it would rob the rest of my PC right?
     
  4. daveid

    daveid Ancient Guru

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    yeah. shared memory is set aside for an onboard video (which you are not using) but it is ALWAYS reserved, and unusable by the system. so disable that if using an add-in video card such as your 6800gs. the apeture setting does NOT keep memory from being used by the system, it is only used when needed, if needed.
     

  5. wolf68k

    wolf68k Member Guru

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    Here's an easy to tell if your system is infact being robbed of system RAM by the shared memory setting.

    Right-click on My Computer and select Properties
    Look down there the bottom, where it says Computer. Look for the listing of how much RAM you have.
    If you know you put 1GB of RAM in there and you ahve the shared memory set to 128MB, and if you're being robbed then it would say 872MB. In which case restart the system and go into the BIOS and see disable the shared memory.
    If after all of that it still says 1GB, then just ignore it. You can still disable it for piece of mind.
     
  6. Frag-master

    Frag-master Guest

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    hes knows what his talking about

    nice
     
  7. QuadCannons

    QuadCannons Guest

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    In 3DMark2001SE I seem to get the best results with aperture size set to 256MB though so I guess that doesn't get carried into games.
     
  8. jaberwockey

    jaberwockey Member

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    Thank you, sad situation has unfolded for me with this mobo. :( I cannot disable the shared memory for that area. I can set it down to 32 I believe and that is what I did. Too bad I did not invest a couple of dollars more, but alas that was not the option when you need a mobo real fast on a weekend and no where but a crappy shop has one. None the less it works cool. Maybe someday i will invest in an ASUS De. :)
     
  9. jaberwockey

    jaberwockey Member

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    Outstanding and easy navigation through a process that will save some heartache in the future. :) It says 1 GB and all seems cool with some tweaks etc. I still need a PSU. Underload I believe it is a bit starved. I will address that later. thnx again great gurus! :)
     
  10. JMerrick

    JMerrick Member Guru

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    I have mine at 256. My video card also has 256, so I have 512 total (in theory). Which is a nice number. No reason in having it lower, it doesn't use the memory unless it needs it, in which case it's always going to be faster than it would be paging textures.
     

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