[K.I.L.E.R]

I've written a program that uses over 100MB of system memory by storing and creating textures on the fly and passing them back and forth in the video card.

The trick to good performance is to develop a organised passing algorithm that takes care of how much textures should be passed at once over the bus.

After that it runs good, I can't come up with a reason why developers don't use system memory to keep massive textures. If properly written you can sitll get good performance.

EDIT - Typo, 100 not 500.

[mad max]

so what should i set my aperture size to for half-life 2. iv got a gig of ddr 400 agp 8x and a 9700 pro.

[K.I.L.E.R]

Don't mind me.

My program didn't take things like shadows into account.
Data based on shadows will need to be passed across the bus.

Much more will as well.

I leave my aperture at 256MB however it isn't necessary to set it up there. On the otherhand some people said they have seen improvements by setting it up to 256MB.

It doesn't hurt to leave it there.

[RussSchultz]

The 'aperture' its talking about is the amount of ram that the AGP DMA bus master can 'see'. THink of it as the window that the AGP card can see in system memory.

The AGP driver must move data into this area if the AGP card is to see it, this takes time, so tthe larger the window, the more the AGP card can see, the less that you need to move stuff in and out of the window to get it to the AGP card.

[K.I.L.E.R]

Textures I can see, though with FW enabled doesn't the CPU send commands directly to the card?