Changing the size of the AGP aperture

The process is described here:

http://www.bf2lag.com/page2.html#Tip3

Does it actually help with gaming performance? If you do it, does it cause a significant decrease in performance when not playing a game or will you not notice it? Also, will it cause any damage to my graphics card and will it take up more power from the power supply?

Thanks.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

The way I understand it is that it just allocates system memory to be used as extra video memory. The information that would be stored in RAM is rendered objects or textures. Now if there's a lack of RAM, the rendered things are dumped and lost and must be re-rendered if needed again. That's where a performance drop might occur. An increase in the AGP aperture size will help here because the info only has to be loaded from RAM.

Now, as for what to set the AGP aperture to... I read once, as a rule, that you should set it to equal your megabytes of actual GPU RAM. Depending on how much system RAM(and GPU RAM) you have, you could set it higher or lower.

I have 5900XT w/ 128MB and my aperture is set to 128MB. I also have 2GB of dual-channel system RAM, so I could probably increase that to 256MB if my motherboard supports it (haven't checked in a while.)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

How often does the lack of ram occur? I usually play BF2, and I have 1.5 gb of ram.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.