In my second box (256MB system RAM), I have an AGP Creative Labs 3D Voodoo Banshee card with a whopping 16 MB of RAM. As a test, in xorg.conf, recently I disabled all graphics acceleration. I also disabled the AGP module in rc.modules. I continue using the stock X tdfx driver instead of the VESA driver.

I notice no difference in graphical performance. Now, I do not play any games (at least, not on my computer ) and I am not into videos, movies, etc. (again, at least, not on my computer ). I seem to have experienced no performance hits. My question then is are my observations correct? Have I indeed lost nothing, and possibly, because I use older hardware, actually gained some additional memory because I am not enabling acceleration and AGP?

Also, I always was under the impression that the video card color depth impacted performance. Yet I notice no difference when toggling between 16-bit and 24-bit color. Am I imagining things? I run older boxes and previously always used 15-bit or 16-bit depths.

I'm no expert on computer graphics and video. I'm curious what some of you might think about this. Thanks again.

That seems to be it. The tdfx driver DOES provide some acceleration.

Enabling/disabling modules may not affect this driver in X. Try doing a FRESH xorgconfig, using only the stock VESA driver, with no video memory,and see what the results are.

Also:
Does not GAIN any memory. You are just disabling the physical memory that is on the card, not changing amounts in system memory.

And AGP is still enebled in the kernel. Try it with a new compile, leaving out the agpgart modules and chipset support. You'll definately see a difference.