AGP aperture size tweak for BF2

[mandugi23]

hi i recently ran into this site called tweakguide.com while researching ways to increase performance in bf2. i have 6600gt, 2g ram running at 800 x 600 with medium setting and i still get 50fps average. i heard that increasing AGP Aperture size to 256mb from 128mb can greatly improve performance of bf2.

so im wondering if this is safe since my video card says it's memory is 128mb, and i dont want to like fry it by doubling agp aperture size.

below is link to the article in which i found out about it.
http://www.tweakguides.com/BF2_9.html

AGP Aperture Size Tweak

"Many readers have written to me swearing that increasing their AGP Aperture Size to 256MB in their BIOS has greatly improved their performance. For the simple reason that I can neither confirm nor deny this to be the truth, and that it is generally harmless to raise your AGP Aperture Size to 256MB, I am noting this here for those of you with AGP-based graphics cards so you can try for yourself.

If you're wondering what the AGP Aperture Size is (along with other graphics-related BIOS Settings), check page 2 of my ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide or my Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide. For the record I don't believe this tweak to actually do much, however as I suggest it can't do any real harm to try if you're willing. Just remember that in some games (such as America's Army) raising the AGP Aperture Size to large values can increase memory-related errors, such as Critical Errors, crashes to Desktop and so forth, so keep that in mind while testing this out, and if in doubt set it to 128MB for optimal speed/stability."

[blue60007]

Not really sure, I had mine set at 128MB when it has 256MB, didn't notice any difference.

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by mandugi23 ... so im wondering if this is safe since my video card says it's memory is 128mb, and i dont want to like fry it by doubling agp aperture size....

You won't hurt anything by changing the setting. Although I've not research aperture size issues an a year or more, I've never been able to find much about it other than it seems to be more of a legacy thing than anything. I've played with various settings and never found any performance changes with the size changes. It could make a difference for you. Try upping / lowering the settings to see if you have any changes; you can always set it back to where you had it.

[catacon]

I have a ATi 9600 AGP card with 256MB of memory and I set the aperature size to 128 and 256 and that made the game worse. As I understand it, the aperature size is the amount of system memory that gets used by the graphics card, so if you have a low memory graphics card (64 or 128MB) you want the aperature size to be higher (256 or 128 respectively). If you have a higher memory card, you want it lower (i.e. 256 card, 64 aperature size). The more memory the card has, the less system memory the card needs, which in turn makes the game run faster. I have my aperature set to 64 and it runs great.

In this thread: http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=135555
read the link PR posts, it clears things up a bit.

Hope that helps.