All of the following BIOS tweaks are good for improving performance, but not overall visual quality. Folks generally mess with these settings in case they are having problems, leaving the defaults in their place. However, some of your defaults might be out of tune with your current system specs, or you might be interested in knowing exactly what these things do. When giving these tweaks, the menu that they are under may vary from motherboard to motherboard, so take our directions with a grain of salt. All of the options listed should be available on any motherboard on the market, however.
First up, let's cover the most important setting - and the one that most folks will end up changing if they change anything at all. This would be the AGP Aperture Size, available from under the Advanced Chipset Features menu, in most mainboards anyways. This setting tells your system how much local memory is available to an AGP video card, for the times when all of the video card's local memory is chewed up. For users that have the standard 128 MB of RAM you'll want to set the Aperture size to either 64 MB or 32 MB. Even if you have 128+ MB you'll want to stay with an Aperture of 64 MB, though some users might want to experiment with going up to a 128MB Aperture size. Those users between 64 MB and 128 MB of RAM will want to use the 32 MB setting most likely.
This setting can also be used to fix strange errors that some folks seem to have with the GeForce series of cards. Sometimes folks experience strange lockup issues, and reducing the Aperture size can help to solve these problems. The only problem with this fix is that performance losses occur, dropping frame rates ~20% under most cases. Some users might be able to try other fixes such as upping the I/O voltage on the mainboard from 3.3v to 3.4 or 3.5v, as well as bumping the AGP speed down from 2x/4x to 1x. This drop in AGP speed only hinders performance about 5-10% on the average, which is better than the Aperture size tweak tip.
Next up we'll cover the other option under the Advanced Chipset Features menu, namely Video RAM cacheable. Video BIOS cacheable has to do with shadowing your system BIOS ROM. Shadowing increases performance by copying the video BIOS code from video adapter's ROM to much faster system RAM. Enabling this setting will allow the system to cache this RAM as well, further increasing performance. This setting is usually left at the default, and remember to have BIOS shadowing enabled for this setting to work. Enabling it might cause problems on some systems, so if you're running into some issues with it on - turn it off.
The next menu we'll cover is the PnP/PCI configuration menu, which lists two options that we care about for this guide. First, let's talk about the PCI/VGA Palette snoop feature. The VGA palette is the set of colors that the video card uses while in 256-color mode. Since there are thousands of colors, and only 256 are available while in that mode, a palette containing the current colors in use is made. Other cards (such as MPEG decoders, etc) need to be able to look at this palette, and enabling this option allows them to do so. This is a fairly dated feature, and should be left DISABLED by default.
And the last thing we'll cover here is Video BIOS Shadowing, which is generally found under the Advanced BIOS Features tab. This parameter turns on BIOS shadowing for the block of memory normally used for standard VGA video ROM code. Shadowing, in short, copies the video BIOS code from slower ROM to system RAM. This, again, is an older tweak that means little in today's world - so leave this DISABLED.
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