Effects of Nvidia graphics card aperture change

Question

I have laptop with nvidia 8200M G.In BIOS setting I can adjust the aperture size from 64 MB to 512 MB.This change reflects as increase in the available RAM. Considering that I don't play ANY games as of now :( my concerns are 1)Is graphics card used for Movie Playback?(or anything other than Games for that matter)If yes, which codecs and where is the settings for it? 2)Would reduced aperture reduce power consumption,heat dissipation?

I am getting atleast more RAM to use so, Overall is there any benefit in reducing the aperture size in BIOS? I am particularly interested from power consumption point of view as laptop has very limited battery life.

I dual boot with Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 9.04.

Laptop configuration: Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM

I would appreciate any links regarding this also if there are any benchmarking tools,please let me know

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You don't mention if you're using 32-bit or 64-bit Vista?

It does make a difference to the answer, 32-bit Vista (and XP) can only use 4GB of RAM total, that includes the RAM on your video card. so if you have 4GB of RAM on your motherboard + 512MB on your video card, then Windows will only be able to use 3.5GB for itself and programs as the video card will have reserved that last 0.5GB for itself. Also if you're running 32-bit Windows and already have 4GB of RAM, then there's no point in adding any more RAM as Windows won't be able to use it.

From this point of view, if you don't play games, or use any other 3D heavy apps, then you have no need of a larger video RAM. Your video card is almost certainly accelerating videos and so on, but doesn't need a huge amount of on-board RAM for that.

64 bit Windows is different as it can address a huge amount of RAM, so the amount on your video card isn't a concern and you may as well leave it at max.

Linux, I've got no idea.