NVIDIA 6200 w/ TurboCache Released

duanep writes "Gamers Depot has posted a first look review at NVIDIA's just announced GeForce 6200 cards with TurboCache - the first graphics cards that truely take advantage of the PCI Express bus by using system RAM to store textures."

Comments

More reviews

[florin]

Here are some other reviews:
TechReport
AnandTech
HotHardware

Some of these make a little more sense because they benchmark the 6200TC against some of its direct competitors in the low end instead of against a mid range card.

I think Gamers Depot's conclusion is a bit off too. What's notable isn't that it is slower than enthusiast cards. Of course it is. What's surprising is how well it still runs the very newest games, despite the drawbacks associated with that pricing range.

Re:More reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry but a PCI fx5700 plays doom3 pretty damn good.

and that is the upper rung of tests for video cards.

it should kick the crap out of a old legacy PCI card and a video chipset from 3 years ago.

the card sucks, and ANY video card that uses system memory is crap. where are the 512 meg and 1 gig video cards? or "GASP" cards with a right angle DDR2 slot on them so I can upgrade it it myself with STANDARD ram?

i'm tired of these low end use system ram cards that are not much better than the bargin bin cards from 3 years ago but cost 3X the price.

Re:More reviews

[florin]

the card sucks, and ANY video card that uses system memory is crap. where are the 512 meg and 1 gig video cards? or "GASP" cards with a right angle DDR2 slot on them so I can upgrade it it myself with STANDARD ram?

The 512 and up cards will be in the power gamer segment. This is something completely different.

Why would you want a separate DIMM slot on your card when you could just add more RAM to the system itself, which you could use for other things when you're not running 3D apps, and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture.

i'm tired of these low end use system ram cards that are not much better than the bargin bin cards from 3 years ago but cost 3X the price.

Read again - for less than 100$ you get 30-36 fps with 8x af in Doom 3, 42 fps in Half Life 2 and 43 in UT2004, and that's at 1024x768. And you can at least look at any modern game right up to any that use Shader Model 3 with full eyecandy. You'll probably turn off antialiasing to actually play, but that's still miles better than any bargain bin card from 3 years ago.

Re:More reviews

[leuk_he]

hothardware "thx nvidia for giving us this card remark"

hothardware:

here is something we should mention about performance, however, especially considering the measurable performance hits the 6200's took with AA enabled. Here's a quote from NVIDIA that explains what was happening...

"The 6200 with TurboCache was designed for the mainstream user. Because of this we made some architectural design decisions such as not supporting color and z-compression. This is not a TurboCache limitation. This was a conscious design decision as most mainstream users play at medium resolutions with little or no filtering. In addition, there is also a known bug in the current ForceWare driver that effects AA performance. NVIDIA engineering is aware of this bug and is working on a fix now for a future driver release that will substantially increase filtering performance."

Translated: no this card is not fast enough to do AA & Anio, sir.

Re:More reviews

[BlueCodeWarrior]

Why would you want a separate DIMM slot on your card when you could just add more RAM to the system itself, which you could use for other things when you're not running 3D apps, and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture.

Because making the graphics card go the whole way back to the system is a lot slower than just using RAM right on the card?

Re:More reviews

[MoP030]

GP: ... and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture...

P: ...the system is a lot slower...

mmmkay that didn't make much sense... was your point that nvidia is lying about the TurboCache performance ? Did you try to debunk GP's quoted assumption?

Re:More reviews

[BlueCodeWarrior]

No, I'm just stating that "isn't all that much slower" matters to someone who wants 1GB of video RAM on their card. They want as fast as possible.

As far as 'not all that much' vs. 'a lot'...I don't claim to know everything about graphics cards, but here's my logic:

1. VRAM is faster than regular RAM.
2. regular RAM is a long way away when you compare it to on-card VRAM which is right there.
3. Slower RAM + farther away = pretty slow

Words like 'a little' and 'a lot' are very subjective...we're talking nanoseconds here, which are still pretty damn small regardless. What seems a lot to me could seem to be a little to someone else.

Re:More reviews

[florin]

No, I'm just stating that "isn't all that much slower" matters to someone who wants 1GB of video RAM on their card. They want as fast as possible.

Yes, so this card and this performance bracket simply isn't for him. He's calling for 512/1GB cards, which aren't even out yet in the consumer market, and the first ones to come out will cost 6-8 times what these TC cards go for.

Words like 'a little' and 'a lot' are very subjective...we're talking nanoseconds here, which are still pretty damn small regardless. What seems a lot to me could seem to be a little to someone else.

We're mainly talking about compromises for low cost. And TC looks like a rather intelligent compromise if you go by these HalfLife 2 benches at Hexus, where they pitch the 6200TC against the regular 6200 with 128MB of onboard RAM - which costs 30$ more.

Re:More reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

driver that effects AA performance

NVIDIA engineering should be aware of this bug too.

Re:More reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want a separate DIMM slot on your card when you could just add more RAM to the system itself, which you could use for other things when you're not running 3D apps, and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture.

Because a direct interface to high speed RAM chips is always going to be faster than going over an intermediary bus. PCI-express is what, 2GB/s? A 256 bit memory bus talking to DDR3-800 (may be coming soon?) is on the order of 25GB/s (800 million * 256 / 8 bits per byte). Of course that's assuming one tranfer per cycle, but you get the point... local memory is always going to be faster than remote memory, by a lot. Plus, you don't pollute the bus with heaps of data when you need a fair chunk of the bandwidth for transferring geometry and such.

Read again - for less than 100$ you get 30-36 fps with 8x af in Doom 3, 42 fps in Half Life 2 and 43 in UT2004, and that's at 1024x768. And you can at least look at any modern game right up to any that use Shader Model 3 with full eyecandy. You'll probably turn off antialiasing to actually play, but that's still miles better than any bargain bin card from 3 years ago.

Fair enough. It's a good idea. I don't think it will take over from onboard memory any time soon.

Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Great for windows / productivity use, and running of spinning cube 3D screensaver.

What's sad is that this card will pop up in gazillion 'budget' home machine that are then sold by clueless salesdroids to even more clueless moms and pops as 'gaming machine' with 'TURBOcache' (so it must be TURBO good).

And naturally such computer will stutter along happily with anything slightly more demanding than CounterStrike (the original one).

*sigh*

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[yobbo]

Clueless Salesdroid must be pretty smart to realise that "mom and pop" don't give a rat's arse how well their PC plays games.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Well, actually some do. If their kid is bugging for a gaming machine, and the salesdroid sells to the clueless parents a computer with part like this, the kid is bound to be disappointed.

I work in computer repairs. EVERY christmas I get people who come asking to see if their computer is somehow broken because "it's so slow". Almost every one of them never bought it from us - they bought it cheap from some big chain electronics store (HP, Compaq, Fujitsu.. you name it) with non-existing support on computers ('call the manufacturer'). Quite often the 'so slow' is because they've been sold a cheap year-old system with 256MB RAM & Windows XP and a video card that can't run games. As a 'computer great for all uses. kids can even play games on it!'.

Basically they were duped into buying not-so-cheap old tech with crap specs. Commonly with same money the could've bought a noticeably faster computer built from parts, but they trusted the 'big name' retail chain more than a specialist store.

So, I stand by my original post. Clueless salesdroids will sell computers that contain these cards as 'great for gaming', and their target audience will be disappointed.

If you want a computer for productivity apps, any builtin onboard video works just fine, and is cheaper to boot. A PCI-E 'turbocache' low end card is not going to change your windows desktop experience one iota. It's just a piece of junk 'low end gaming card' that underperforms for it's target use (gaming). Selling cheap crap cards using same brand name (GeForce) as their top end 500$ ubermonster cards is called 'milking the brand at all price points'. At least AMD has the decency to sell their low end stuff under another brand (Sempron). Videocard companies should do the exact same thing.

Thankfully it's noticeably faster than crap like Geforce 4 MX and GeForce FX5200.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[koi88]

Clueless Salesdroid must be pretty smart to realise that "mom and pop" don't give a rat's arse how well their PC plays games.

"Uhm, I mean Internet. It runs the Internet much faster. Everything is three-D these days, you know. And now if you got this TURBO..."

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe mom and pop should buy a "homework" PC, so their snot nosed kid can pay for their own gaming machine some day.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

are you fucking stupid?

I can run doom3 ad MEDIUM settings on a 128 meg PCI nvidia card from 3 years ago. and it looks GOOD and is smooth at SANE resolutions.... only 1024X768... i know i'm a loser fro not riunning it at 15453x5640... please pity me.

game play is more important than a couple more pixels on screen you idiots.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing as it might seem to you, there are actually people who like playing 3d games, and arent power gamers who want to spend tons of money.

For example, I bought my 3d video card at $80, and I like to buy the older computer games that are discounted to $10-$20. Works out fine.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Methuseus]

I am one of those sales droids, unfortunatley. I will specifically tell people what each component does if they will listen to me, and when I say it will play a lot of games fine, but not most newer games, they will tell me, "oh, I don't want it for games anyway." and then bring it back in a week saying that their kid couldn't play Doom 3 on it.

So, it's not just the sales people that create this problem, it's customers not listening to the sales people. I will, however, admit I do sometimes tell someone "oh yeah, it'll be great for games" because that is their one and only question and they won't believe me when I say no. Sometimes the customers just make it less of a hassle to do it that way.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom and gameplay?
My god the gameplay is just a "few more" pixels then doom 1.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[DrEldarion]

Yup. Getting 36FPS in Doom 3 at 1024x768 in high quality and 42 in HL3 at the same resolution is DEFINITELY "stuttering along".

Maybe you should actually look at the benchmarks before you jump to conclusions?

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[swv3752]

Well. if you actually RTFA, you would see that the card is playable for modern games at 1024x768. Slightly older games at 1280x1024. Seeing how the types of systems the card is meant for the consumer is likely to have an LCD that has a max resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, this means the card will work fine.

Not everyone wants to have an uber gaming card that takes up multiple slots, sounds like a dustbuster, and costs as much an entire mid spec computer. http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-09-21-2 004.ars/2 It wouldn't cost anymore to go socket 939 or 754 now but gives you an idea.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[djhack]

you work in computer repair ?
for what , 2 weeks ?!? or in your basement ?

you think brand names mean anything ? customers can tell a computer from a monitor , as far as they're concerned AMD AthlonXP Sempron 2200+ , AMD AthlonXP Barton 3000+ and AMD Athlon64 3200+ with 1mb cache are all the same thing , and they don't even know they have one in their computers
people who says "I want to play games" they get a mid-range card (nvidia 6600)
the rest the get a GF4MX or a FX5200 which is between 30$ and 80$ but that is wasted money 90% of the time , via's on-board video is more than enough for the vast majority of computers
many people get printers and never print , 19" monitors that spend their entire live at 800x600 , 120GB hard drives that never see more than 1GB of data

when you design a PC , you make it so it will fulfill the needs of the majority , anything more is a waste of money , a loss of profits for you , and a loss of sales because your computers seem more expensive for what is "the same thing" in the customer's eye

you say the GF4MX and FX5200 is crap , to you maybe , but for most it's better they ever had , need for speed underground 2 , doom 3 and half-life 2 run just fine with that card , and 95% of the customers couldn't tell the difference between half-life 2 running under a GF4MX and 700$ 6800

you must like those guys who aren't satisfied with on-board anything and just have to install an extra network card, sound card , serial-ata raid card and f*cking usb card , because "on-board is so lame!"

just because you've been fixing your buddies' computers doesn't mean their configuration represent even a tiny fraction of what's out there , and what will do the job for most customers

slashdot@domn.net

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Aggrazel]

Yeah but for those stats they tested it on a P4 3.6Ghz with Corsair ram and a good mobo with an Audigy card in it.

Anyone who puts this cheap ass video card in a system like that is only crippling their system. Heck, that CPU alone retails for $450. I would rather save money and buy a slightly cheaper CPU and then get a better video card.

If you match this card up with what it's meant to be paired with, IE a value CPU, then it really is a piece of crap and you'd be better off getting a cheap Geforce 4 off Ebay.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[dlZ]

I also own a PC Repair shop and see the same exact situations. Year old tech, built in Intel/Sis video, and they were sold the machine as "gaming ready" while the poor thing is having problems with running just Windows. Many of these machines only have 128 megs RAM. And it's even more fun explaining to these people what an AGP slot is, and why their computer will never be what they want it to be because of the lack of one inside their box.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Two years. And no, I do not repair 'brand name' crap that HP/Compaq/Dell/Fujitsu/etc push out. I do repair few smaller brands (Acer mostly), plus our own - built from components to order - computers.

And onboard sound and LAN work just fine for my needs, and the needs of 99% of our customers. I do have a separate Intel LAN card in my desk drawer for emergencies, but I've used my onboard Gbit LAN for quite a while with no issue.

Like I said, most customers are perfectly happy with onboard video. If more cost-effective solution is to sell a low end non-onboard video motherboard + cheapo 9200SE or FX5200 videocard, that's the deal. The store I work for DOES NOT claim it runs games. At all. The first question our salespeople asks is 'Do you want to play games beyond Solitaire on it?'. If the answer is 'yes', the discussion currently *starts* from 9800pro. If the price becomes an issue, they bring the discussion to 'budget' gaming cards, 9600XT and the like. With disclaimer stating that there may be issues with performance when playing the latest shiny games. Most customers understand it perfectly. If they still have an issue with price, we'll tell them that their remaining option is to go with the cheapest possible, without expectation that it runs games well.

'Not lying to customer'. Try it sometimes. It brings repeat customers. Most people who balk about price buy from '699 euros! SPECIAL!' big ads for big name electronics chains. And pull a cubic assload of crap as a computer. Same people come crying to our full service desk with their issues, but only thing we can say 'Contact compaq/fujitsu/HP/dell for warranty service. Or if you insist, we can repair it outside warranty, but due to non-standard parts that may take a while and be quite expensive'. Most people leave to battle with the automated phone systems of the big manufacturers.

In fact, such 'bargain hunter' idiots ... we don't even WANT those people as customers. Sure, if they appear into our store, we serve them, being honest and offering our expert advice. We even carry specific models that are great for low end websurfing & wordprocessing. Very cheap. We still don't claim they play games.

And this 6200 'Turbo Cache' is one of the videocards that are SOLD As 'GREAT FOR GAMING' while it's nowhere near that. In our store this card will be sold to people that specifically do not want onboard video (maybe due to lack of TV-OUT), or specifically want features from the motherboard that are not available with onboard video. Nobody will ever claim it's good for gaming. At best a salesdroid may say 'yeah, it should start up most games, but it's not meant for gaming. performance will be poor.'. That's called 'being truthful to your customers'. If a customer balks at you or thinks you are too expensive, then a good salesperson knows when to give up and tell him to choose themselves or shop elsewhere. Recommendations are a service. Customer is free to ignore them.

Unsurprisingly, sometimes the 'choose themselves'-customers come back to exchange for the more expensive model later. Costs extra to pop open the computer and replace the card naturally, but that's called "paying for your stupidity".

In my experience, being truthful and fair to customers brings them back. Repeatedly. And they PAY for that. Quite well. And those who refuse to pay are usually not that interesting customers to us anyway. We are happy to let big retail chains fuck them over. They usually learn their mistake and next time, few years down the road, we usually get a new customer with slightly more clue.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[BlueCodeWarrior]

Then you are not a 'gamer.' You are someone who likes to play games on their computer.

There is a difference.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

It's great if you are happy with it.

However, our salespeople would never recommend such a setup for gaming. If you insist you cannot afford better one, we sure offer one for sale to you at low price. We *still* remind you that it might not quite be what you expect from a gaming card. We usually even offer that you can come back and exchange it for a faster card if you are unhappy, as long as you retain all paperwork and accessories and ensure the box stays neat. Even with the risk that next buyer balks that the box is 'opened'. It's called 'good service'.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[kaleco]

I have an FX5200 and recently completed Half Life. It's not terrible, I practially bought it for the price of it's construction. It does run Counterstrike well and that's actually why I've not invested in new hardware for a long time. Counterstrike has contented me for the last year and a half.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

I ignore benchmarks that test a low-end card with high end monster setup.

Besides, 36FPS is kinda poor. Sure, it beats old low end crap. It's actually not that far from good midrange cards. But still, I would *not* recommend it for gaming. Maybe as a low-cost option for those who just can't afford better, and understand it might underperform a bit in latest games.

Besides, Both Doom3 and HL2 are *not* that intensive on videocards. Try Everquest 2. It makes 6800 Ultras cry. Thing is, that's forward-looking engine. In a year most games will be like it, and that 6-12 months old 6200 TURBO Cache will be dog slow with 'em. People buy computers to last for 3-5 years. If they find that the latest game doesnt even RUN on their computer less than 2 years after purchase, they will be very unhappy if it was sold 'for gaming'.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Um, it's all about what it's sold for.

This card will not, ever, be 'great for gaming'.

It may be 'passable for gaming if you don't mind somewhat low performance'. I can see multitude of situations where this would be a good card for a customer. Even a bit 'high end' card for him. I still would never recommend it for gaming.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[stratjakt]

AthlonXP Sempron 2200+ , AMD AthlonXP Barton 3000+ and AMD Athlon64 3200+ with 1mb cache are all the same thing

Realistically, they are. Your gaming experience wouldnt change noticably from one of those CPUs to the next.

You really don't need a lot of horsepower to run modern games.

I dont know if the dingii who always have the latest $500 video card have ever even tried playing on "cheap" equipment, but you'd be surprised how much you can squeeze out of an S4.

I have an older (first-mobile-gen) Radeon Mobility in my laptop, and I'm sure most of these "I play video games alot and am therefore all things to do with 3d rendering" would be blown away at how much you can actually do with something like that.

Hell, I have a GF4MX in my machine at work, and have played stuff like Halo and Far Cry on it. Both perfectly playable, and just as fun, just not at 1600x1200 with 16x FSAA and all that kind of crap.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[EnglishTim]

You're too harsh on these low-end cards. A while back I bought my daughters a PC with built-in nForce graphics. Sure, it's not that quick, but it runs their games okay, if not brilliantly. Sure the resolution is normally 640x480 or 800x600, but they seem happy with it, and it's cheap. I figured I could get them a decent card for it if they needed it, but now it doesn't look like I'll need to.

This is (IIRC) an nForce-2 board. Basically has a GeForce 4MX built in using 32Mb of system RAM for video memory.

Now, I confess they're not playing DOOM3 or HL2 on it, but for what it is it's not bad. This new card from nVidia looks to be considerably faster, so should be fine, even for games like DOOM3 or HL2, as long as you don't mind the lower resolutions and merely reasonable framerates.

You have to remember that many people are quite happy playing at 640x480 @ 25fps..

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite often the 'so slow' is because they've been sold a cheap year-old system with 256MB RAM & Windows XP and a video card that can't run games.

Right. I have two laptops with intel integrated graphics chipsets. I can play quite a few mainstream releases with no problems on either one. I doubt that a system equipped with a standalone graphics card, no matter how crappy, would fare worse. Maybe instead of calling your customers names and treating them like idiots for buying what is in your opinion the 'wrong' computer, maybe you should just try suggesting that people with speed problems should try tweaking graphical settings.

As a 'computer great for all uses. kids can even play games on it!'.

How is that a lie for a system with 256MB RAM that can run Windows XP? That system could play at least 90%+ of the PC games on the shelf in 'big name' retail chain stores. Do you ever look at the games sold in Target, Best Buy, etc.? The new-release hits are all in one small section and the rest of the PC games are stuff you would find in a bargain bin at a dedicated gamestore or in the PC section of Half-Price Books.

It isn't a coincidence those stores sell both low-end computers and low-end software. They aren't concerned with arrogant, presumptuous geeks or their haughty opinions on what constitutes cheapness or cluelessness, or the pseudonymous claims of some repairdroid posting on slashdot thinking he could've built the same system more cheaply. They have their niche, and judging by national sales figures - rather than negative tech-support anecdotes, which honestly are a dime a dozen - things are going reasonably well for stores like Circuit City and Wal-Mart.

If you want a computer for productivity apps, any builtin onboard video works just fine, and is cheaper to boot. A PCI-E 'turbocache' low end card is not going to change your windows desktop experience one iota. It's just a piece of junk 'low end gaming card' that underperforms for it's target use (gaming). Selling cheap crap cards using same brand name (GeForce) as their top end 500$ ubermonster cards is called 'milking the brand at all price points'. At least AMD has the decency to sell their low end stuff under another brand (Sempron). Videocard companies should do the exact same thing.

Thankfully it's noticeably faster than crap like Geforce 4 MX and GeForce FX5200.

I played Far Cry on an FX5200 system with no slowdown - and it was not even close to the same thing as playing using an integrated chipset.

Since it contradicts known facts in every area they are broached, your quixotic screed can be interpreted as little more than a manifestation of baseless anti-corporatism, puzzlingly combined with a technocrat's arrogant elitism. Instead of focusing your energies on how dumb and stupid customers are, or how immoral and unethical corporations are, I suggest you focus and heal thyself first.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[CFTM]

Hahaha this somewhat reminds of my days in high school when I worked at a computer store. Some woman called up interested in buying a computer and she gave me a ridiculously low price range (like $300). I asked her if she was willing to pay any more than that to which she responded no. I told her that there wasn't really a machine we could build her for three hundred bones (this was before the major motherboard companies started releasing boards that basically have everything you'd need onboard so you still had to go buy a soundcard, a nic etc etc). I told her for three hundred dollars the only thing she'd really be able to afford was one of those piece of shit e-Machines, but I didn't recommend them because they sucked. She said she'd think about it and come back ... whatever no skin off my back.

Three months later we get a phone call from this woman and she is irate because the computer she bought is terrible. Customers are fucking stupid, they hear what they want to hear and do what they want to do and then blame sales people for not being able to give them a quality product at $300. What it comes down to is people get what they pay for ...

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

You make a lot of good points in your discussion. In general people get what they pay for, and most people know this.

One of my big faults is being a technology snob, and I endlessly upgrade my home PC. It is a sad fact that I get as much enjoyment from increasing my 3D-Mark 2005 scores by having a dual PCI SLI graphics set up, as I do from actually playing games on the beast.

However I do know deep down that I am paying a lot of money out for very little real benefit. HalfLife2 doesn't have to be played in high-res with 4xAA. Halflife 2 play's just great on my wife's PC (an old Athlon 1800+ with a 9600pro). I would also point out her PC runs almost silently - compared to my beast. (often its too little Ram that really slows things down, if a game uses swap file space - its single frame juddershow)

The latest Apples iMacs only have 5200's in them and unreal 2004 seems to run fine on them.

As games have varying degrees of requirements its almost a shame PCs cannot be given something like a 3D-Mark rating (makes more sense than 2200+ anyway), and then games have the same ratings on them - so you know if your PC will play the game.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Kuad]

Thankfully it's noticeably faster than crap like Geforce 4 MX and GeForce FX5200.

I think that's the important thing to remember here. NV have found a way to cut costs on a budget card while including all the next generation features the OEMs want, and made it faster than the old low end cards.

I fail to see the problem.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Actually, that *was* one of the ideas of Futuremark, the company that publishes 3dmark.

Sadly I think they tried to make the game companies pay for their logo & right to include the 3dmark score 'requirements', and I don't think any software publisher took on the idea.

I seem to recall some MS 'Windows XP game recommender' at some point that used 3dmark database as a source for data to analyze your setup and compare it to what the game required/recommended. Neat system, way too few games listed tho.

Actually, here it is;
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/game s/gam eadvisor/default.mspx

(requires usage of insecure browsers due to use of ActiveX)

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[dfiguero]

Almost every one of them never bought it from us - they bought it cheap from some big chain electronics store (HP, Compaq, Fujitsu.. you name it) with non-existing support on computers ('call the manufacturer')

I'm sorry but I disagree with you. Just because they didn't buy a PC from a small shop doesn't mean it's crap. You can't hold HP+Compaq, Fujitsu, et al. responsible for what a user buys.

These companies put out systems for regular folks who want to see digital photos from their cousins in Nevada or want to chat with their grandmothers in Japan.

Last I heard none of these were Alienware dedicated to that specific market! What is the point of shoving an extra $200 bucks down the throat of the regular user for a "next-generation" video card that they won't probably use?

And you can't blame system manufacturers since they all display what their products include (memory, cpu speed, hdd, etc.) It's not their fault that the sales drone in can't distinguish between a PC and a MAC and hence make crappy recommendations.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[djhack]

you utterly underestimate the low-end graphics cards, the FX5200 is roughly the equivalent a of GF3Ti , it can run anything recent just fine and cost only about 60$ , you're the one being dishonest telling your customers the "need" a 9800pro to play any recent game , at all

the 9800pro , the cheapest model I can find is this one
MSI RADEON RX9800PRO-TD128 128M (TV/DVI) 260
260$ , you put 60$ more and you get a full computer

(
BIOSTAR M7VIG W/SEMPRON 2200+ V/L/AUD $113
256MB DDR PC400 $45
CHENBRO PC80569 M.ATX W/270W (BK/SL) $70
Seagate 80GB 7200 $73
PAN 1.44 FD $11
LG 52X INT. IDE $16
) = $328 (all CND btw)

you overestimate the need of your customers and underestimate the hardware , have you actually tried running a FX5200 with recent game , if you set realistic settings , (btw , if you thing your customers can tell between 800x600 and 1280x1024 in a game , you're only kidding yourself , I've seen people use 1500$ computers and not even bother to adjust the game settings) , you propose a low-end card then work your way up if you can gauge they actually could use the extra video power , not doing so is selling your customers something they don't need , how's that for being thruthful to your customers eh?

now this new card probably beats the pants off a FX5200 or even a TI4800 , you didn't say the ti4800 was pure junk only fit to display powerpoint on tv last year now did you ?

sure the bulk of computers are being bought at big chains even if they offer the lowest spec computer at the price of you're descent computer , but customers don't know that , they don't have your perspective , they only bought one computer in 2 year how could they tell the small shop is a better deal than the big chain blasting them 24/7 on tv ? surely bigchainINC is a better deal , they didn't get this big fucking people up now did they ?
and everyone know small shops are always trying to screw you over selling you stuff you don't need , like those damn mecanics ! ;)

oh well , that's it for my pointless rant , it's going nowhere fast, I'm so happy I dumped that sh*t job a year ago !

slashdot@domn.net

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Sure, GF3ti500 was a fine card when it was released.

Have you played todays games? At all?

Also remember that we take into account the future. Computers are not fashion items that are replaced every year, so we do not sell a new computer to a customer every year. Instead we aim to sell him a setup that will serve him for reasonable time - 3-5 years usually - without a need for upgrade. Most parts have 3 year warranty anyway.

Had I sold a customer GF3ti500 for gaming two years ago, today he'd still be happy gaming with it. It might already feel bit slow, but all games start with it. Some DX9 shiny might be missing, but that's not critical. Had I sold him the 'sensible, low cost' option 2 years ago, today he'd be cursing me for selling that POS GF4MX.

Same thing today. When I sell the customer 260$ Radeon 9800pro, it will (guaranteed) launch and play every game published within the next 24 months. It will most likely play reasonably well every game published in the next 36-48 months.

Computers are not disposables. At least not to people around here. They fully expect their big purchase will keep them happy for a MINIMUM of 3 years without upgrades. Preferrably 5. I guess in USA people prefer to buy 300$ computers every year. Over here 900 euros for a computer that will serve you well for at least 3 years (And be bit on the powerful side during the first year) is called 'a better deal'. As a bonus you usually get more durable components.

Why bother when better deal is to resell a computer every year? Well, in Finland customer protection laws are much better than in the US. Basically if you sell a computer, no matter what you say as warranty, it must last 2 years, or you as a reseller are liable to cover the repair costs. So in Finland its actually unproftable to sell junk crap parts with crappy warranties. Even if you sell it as '6 months warranty', the law states you are liable for the 'expected durability of the item' (which has been translated to 'two years' in case of computers via test cases).

'Be honest' - 'Sell computers that actually last 3-5 years for the use they are inteded for' -> repeat customers. They come less often, but they are happier. And happy customers come often to buy consummables like ink, CDRs and other stuff like that.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

Problem is, this card will end up being touted as a 'great gaming card' by clueless salesdroids (or computers using this part will be sold as 'great gaming computers'). The 'Turbocache' architecture will gimp the card pretty badly.

So I stand by my original statement - this is a '3d screensaver card'. Gamers will be disappointed by it's performance. If not today, then year from now. And people want to buy computers that serve them for more than a year for the intended purpose.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[djhack]

after about a year , most hardware is equally obsolete

last year I bought a FX5900 256mb with all the whistle bells and kitchen sinks , I paid the damn thing 680$ thinking half-life 2 was just around the corner (about 5 days before they pushed the release date a lot , I think it was mid-september 2003)
today this card this card , or the low end FX5900 that was half the price is going to get you very closely the same result than my card , heck , even a FX5700 that was only 150$ at the time is hard to tell from my card performance wise in today's games

If I had been able to predict the the futur I would have known it was a much better deal to pay 150$ every 3 months than to get this card , but the thing is it would have been the same if I waited a full year before spending my 150$ and get a 6600 today

same thing with CPUs and just about anything else

2 years ago you could pay about 200$ for a athlonxp 1800 or 145$ for a athlonxp 1500 , looking back on this it's safe to say that the difference between those 2 cpus is insignifiant , same thing with today's 2200 sempron or barton 3000+

with computers below the 300$ CANADIAN dollars they have become disposable , you can argue all you want , but in a year in a half your 1500$ pentium 4 with ati 9800pro is going to be just as obsolete as my 350$ AMD 2200 box with a GF4MX , but the guy who bought the 350$ still has 1150$ to get a new computer , in fact he could just buy 4 of them and give 2 of them to his kids and one to his wife , and still get roughly the same the enjoyment out of it

also the argument that you have to give 2 years warranty doesn't matter , because the 300$ box has 2 years warranty anyway , and on top of that biostar hardware is not less reliable than MSI or ASUS or AOPEN ... sure you could get a 200$ computer with ECS/PCCHIPS/AMPTRON/FIC/ASROCK/SYNTAX and that sort of crap , then reliability becomes an issue , but anyway , with the entire box the price of any one major component of your box , I hardly see how that could be more of a problem to support the presumably less reliable box (based solely on the fact that it's cheaper)

also with the razor sharp margin you can make on computers here , you'd have a hard time moving the deluxe overpriced stuff when the ecominical stuff does the just just as well

and trying to compensate low volume by making it back on consumable wouldn't work here , you can get 100dvd spindles for 25$ here (that's a big 3$ profit) same thing with cartridge refills , only super-high volume places actually profit on cd/dvd media and ink , they actually use computers to lure customers into buying ink, cds, dvds, extended warranties and cables

the time of the computer that you keep for 5 years is over , last year's top computer is just as obsolete as last year's cheapest bargain , they are both still useful and they can still be used to access the internet , watch movies , do word processing , just like any descent pentium 200 , but manufacturer managed to lure customers into thinking they will be able to do more with a "better" computer when in fact the difference is minimal , they all suck equally

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Actually, some games are actually cpu limited even with old geforce 2's. Day of Defeat and Natural Selection (HL1 mods) used to get low fps for me with an old 1.2GHz tbird. I upgraded to a 2600+ and my fps maxed out on DoD (vysnc=on). Natural Selection would still go down into the 40's at times, and even upgrading my geforce2 to a geforce6800 didnt prevent that. Sure, I can get 8500 3dmarks in 3dmark03build340, but I cant get constant 60 fps in Natural selection... CPU is more important in most games than many people give it credit for.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[drix]

Mmm, yes, sad. I can feel myself getting a little misty even as I type this.

In other news, mass murderer Osama Bin Laden released a new tape today, confirming he is alive and and kicking and intent upon more mass murdering; x people got blown up in Iraq today, where x is a real number between 10 and 300; The Sudanese are starving; and N. Korea and Iran will probably have a shitload of nukes by the end of the decade.

Goddamn those bastards at Nvidia for needlessly adding to the world's sadness.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[NeMon'ess]

Games like Farcry do max out the CPU. on a 2200+ it won't matter if the vid card is a 9800 Pro or an x700. Use a 3200+ and suddenly that x700 will literally double the fps.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[NeMon'ess]

I read the fucking article, and YOU'RE WRONG. Start from this benchmark and keep going. Doom3 800x600 no AA got 34 and 21.5fps with the new cards. That's barely playable and unplayable at 1024. Farcry 800x600 gets 36.3 and 27.1. In just six months the newest games will only be playable at 640x480.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Forbman]

Sorry, it's hard to beat a $800 system from Dell, Gateway, HPaq, EMachines that also includes a printer, a 17" lcd monitor, and a decent 3GHz P4.

It's just not possible to do this on your own. Maybe spec from a whitebox seller you could, but not if you're getting your parts off of the retail bin, even if you're buying OEM parts.

For one, buying XP Home/Pro retail eats a good chunk of your budget right there.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Forbman]

And, while an FX5200 may *seem* like a crap card, when I bought mine last year for $120, it seemed like a good price point.

There is just no fucking way I could ever justify buying a $400 video card, not even to myself.

Besides, Halo runs just fine with it, once I turned off most of the essential crap (like antialiasing, etc), on my Athlon 1400 to boot.

If I were to recommend a "training" program to FPS players, it would be to play on-line using a slow system with framerate and lag issues. You tend to get VERY good at anticipating where your character might actually be in game space, so that when you do go play on a "real" computer, the game is just so much slower for you it's sick at how easy the game becomes.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

I can add a little perspective here. I have an older friend who is not a serious gamer. He wouldn't ever invest $400+ into a new high end video card in order to play the latest and greatest. I tell him about how cool Doom3 is, and he thinks that's nice but he's not interested.

He just got into Quake III Arena. ???!!! Yeah, I find it appauling, I cannot relate to that at all. But the point is, this guy, and probably many bargain hunters out there, aren't out on the bleeding end itching to play the latest and greatest. There are people who want to buy the low-end cards, knowing they will play the older games fine, and they stay a few years behind the curve, they still get a good gaming experience, just that it happens quite a long time after "normal" people. And they have the patience to wait for prices to come down. In the end they get a high quality experience at a fraction of the cost that all the people who had it when it was fresh and hot had to pay.

I'm actually a little jealous of this guy, because I feel like I'm a victim of the hype. I have to upgrade, I have to have pretty recent tech. Slow old crap is garbage not fit for my own system. If I had some more patience, I could pay so much less and still enjoy all the games, even if it is after every one else played them already.

I have no doubt you are right about some parents cluelessly buying something that will dissappoint their kids, who will try to play the latest and greatest and not be happy. I don't know what to say to them, besides inform their parents, buy the best they can for their budget. But still, I think there are a lot of people who are somewhat immune to the hype machine and can find significant value in low-end cards such as these.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

underperforms for it's target use

"its".

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, fuck off, you condescending asshole.

I'm a gamer, but I don't have the latest hardware. My computer is over 5 years old, and I use it to play Quake 2 regularly. I have made Q2 maps on it. I have maintained Q2 mods on it. In addition, I am writing my own game from "scratch" on it.

A gamer is a person who plays/mods/writes games. I am a gamer.

What you are probably referring to is a "gaming fanboy loser with great finger/thumb reflexes but no social life except for other gamers". And, yes, there is a difference between that subclass of gamer and the more casual kind.

Re:Woot, another 3D screensaver card

[Jarnis]

http://theinquirer.net/?article=20318

Is getting 6fps?

Suddenly the achilles heel shows up. It uses system RAM to substitute for video ram, and boom, using 512MB RAM the FPS drops to one third of what it is with 1GB.

Great thing nvidia gave guidelines to testers of this card - 'use fast cpu and 1GB RAM'

This card is pure crap.

A much better review

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the review posted in the blurb is about as informative as an NVIDIA press release, check out the review at Hexus. It's not Beyond3D, but it will do.

Also at Anand's

[Emil Brink]

AnandTech also has a review up. I'm wondering if this solution will be interesting to... anyone, basically. Perhaps if/once it becomes available integrated into or onto motherboard chipsets.

Btw, I find AnandTech's terminology annoying, they refer to all graphics memory as "the framebuffer" which I find inaccurate. In my world, the frame buffer is only that part of graphics memory that has a 1-to-1 mapping to on-screen pixels. Front- and backbuffers, stencil and Z buffers, basically. Not texture buffers, off-screen rendering targets, geometry arrays, and all that stuff. Oh well. Nice review anyway. :)

Re:Also at Anand's

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always kinda felt annoyed when reading anandtech stuff. Don't know why, exactly. Just rubbed the wrong way, I guess.

It's nice to see that someone else agrees.

Re:Also at Anand's

[Riff6809]

One definition of a frame buffer is any buffer that stores the contents of an image using individual pixels. Your prefered usage adds on the distinction that the buffer is used to refresh a raster image. I do prefer restricting the use of 'frame buffer' to the memory buffer used to refresh the raster display, but there are other instances where the other definition has been used. The Nuon architecture and programming documentation refers to any memory region that is capable of being displayed or manipulated via pixel DMA as being a frame buffer. Part of this reason is that any image has the potential to be a frame buffer - simply set the channel base to the start of the buffer and set the width and height accordingly.

Re:Also at Anand's

[HR]

Errr... I think he does know why. Exactly.

Older card better?

[uid100]

Wouldn't it make more sense to buy a 6 month to year old card that has on board (and *faster*) memory?

Re:Older card better?

[mat catastrophe]

And be that much farther behind the Curve? NO! more power to the Engines, Mister Scott!

Re:Older card better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you want a card that supports Shader Model 3.0

Re:Older card better?

[Quarters]

If this card were meant to be sold primarily at retail, yes, but you and I are not the target market for this card. Dell, IBM, HP, eMachines, Apple, etc... are the customers nVidia wants with this. To a systems integrator "Runs the latest DX9 (or OGL) apps and is dirt cheap because it uses system RAM" is a huge selling point. nVidia wants a lucrative contract to supply this things to Dell for 12-18 months.

Re:Older card better?

[bvankuik]

contract to supply this thing to Dell

I wouldn't mind one of these things in my laptop. Cheap and just fine if you only occasionally play a game.

Re:Older card better?

[Zentac]

Ofcourse it won't make more sense, It would be downright stupid, because of the simple fact that those cards will not be PCIe

Advantage?

[RAMMS EIN]

``the first graphics cards that truely take advantage of the PCI Express bus by using system RAM to store textures''

The advantage of which is that you have less system RAM available for other stuff?

Re:Advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean RAM manufactures are like Lawyers?

You have to pay for it no matter which side.

Re:Advantage?

[Richard Dick Head]

Yes. Doom 3 will wipe it's ass with this card, but Turok should chug along just fine :D

Re:Advantage?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

There is the matter of cost, graphics RAM appears to cost more than simple system RAM. They aren't the same kind or speed of memory.

Re:Advantage?

[Tx]

The advantage of which is that you have less system RAM available for other stuff?

The advantage of which is that system RAm is cheaper, and most people have more of it than they need.

Re:Advantage?

[florin]

Not necessarily, because this card is largely meant to compete with integrated video chipsets from the likes of Intel, SiS, ATI and yes Nvidia themselves, which typically also use system RAM, but which are nowhere near competitive with this thing when it comes to feature support and performance.

Re:Advantage?

[jamiethehutt]

Because you dont want Doom 3 textures eating up RAM Photoshop could be using, because you use those at the same time...

Re:Advantage?

[plupster]

The advantage is that you can use the "video memory" (which is the system RAM) in other applications when not playing games.

Re:Advantage?

[Kosi]

If you could use system RAM on a graphics card without severe disadvantages, graphics cards would ship with DIMM sockets instead of the expensive graphics RAM.

Nothing "Turbo" and not any cache here, this is just an evil try to sell you much less card for more $.

Re:Advantage?

[Tx]

I didn't say it works as well as onboard video RAM. But if you read the benchmarks, it's pretty clear it could have it's uses on budget cards, which is what it's intended for.

Re:Advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an advantage - you still need the textures in system RAM, they get copied over to video RAM as/when they are needed (in some cases the video ram is insufficient for all the textures in a scene and you get thrashing).... in theory you could get the textures from somewhere else other than system ram, but this is rarely practical.

So you have two copies of the textures generally, and with this system you only have one copy (i.e. an advantage) - if it is done right you'll lose no system RAM at all... Although system RAM over PCI Express is not going to perform like dedicated ram on the card.

Re:Advantage?

[Kosi]

The "turbo cache" lie (meant to make you think it was faster, not slower) and that they encourage card manufacturers to conceal the RAM crippling let me suspect otherwise.

Re:Advantage?

[Surt]

Yep, I frequently screenshot in doom 3, switch to photoshop, edit it up, send to friends.

Re:Advantage?

[drinkypoo]

I strongly disagree. Most people have 256mb or less. There are actually people out there running a pc w/128MB that CAME with XP preloaded. Win2k uses 128mb just booting and logging in, let alone XP. Most people have far less ram than they need. For intance one app should not put you into swap.

Re:Advantage?

[Kehvarl]

Win2k uses 128? not on my 64MB win2k box (which is much snappier than my 256MB winXP box at work). and don't tell me it's virtual ram either, I don't have that much space free on the 2.2Gig hard drive in the machine (virtual memory is capped at 64MB and never fill sup to the point that it has to be resized).

Re:Advantage?

[netfool]

What else are you doing while your gaming? Isn't hard enough playing Day of Defeat against 14 year olds who have the reflexes of a pissed off cheetahs.

Re:Advantage?

[drinkypoo]

at work win2k pro plus symantec av pro corp 8.1 goes slightly into swap, and that is without shared video. I find it hard to believe that you run win2k with any applications in 64+64. Further I would expect it to memork leak its way to a bluescreen.

Re:Advantage?

[Drilian]

Most of the time (At least in the DirectX world), copies of loaded textures are stored in RAM anyway, in case the device is lost (window resize or switch from fullscreen windowed). This is part of the "managed" video memory pool. Thus any time the texture is modified (or cached out of video memory) it can be cached back in.

Consequently, as long as the app is coded properly (Again, in the DX world, I'm guessing that most probably are - It's easy to create a managed pool texture), and the driver handles it properly, you wouldn't need to distinguish between the "video memory" copy and the "system memory" copy. So you wouldn't be losing any RAM space. Plus there's no mem copy back to the card (or, more importantly, FROM the card) when the texture changes.

Re:Advantage?

[runderwo]

This is the same way Intel used the i740 as a tool to promote AGP. The i740 drivers (and perhaps the hardware) were incapable of mapping textures from local memory. Since all textures had to be stored in system memory, the marketing diagrams showed "OMG! AGP2x is 4 times faster than PCI!!!".

The i740 architecture eventually became integrated into the motherboard chipset as the i810. In-memory texturing makes a lot more sense there.

Re:Advantage?

[Kehvarl]

it's 2k pro,with 64 and 64. and I frequently have it running for days at a time with trillian, and firefox for most of that time. Occasionally it runs VS 6.0 for an hour or two at a time.

Video doesn't use shared, ut it's only a 4meg card.

That said, I don't use it for much anymore now that my new linux box laptop are my primary machines.

Am I the only one

[PhrostyMcByte]

who wouldn't pay $80 for a card with 16mb of video ram? you can get a faster geforce4 card for the same price. no applications that use dx9 are going to run properly on the thing anyway, so what's the point?

Re:Am I the only one

[networkz]

Half Life 2 and Doom 3 both do.

The difference in HL2 between DX8 and DX9 is noticable.

My Athlon800 runs faster in DX9 with my ATI 9600XT. With DX8 mode activated it _crawls_.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get geforce4 cards for $20.00
FX5700's go for $70 - $80 US and will kick the ever living crap out of that card.

I suggest you stop shopping at places that have inflated prices.

yes only fools buy video cards at Best buy and circuit city. (compusa is in there too for fools)

Re:Am I the only one

[dunc78]

You are incorrect to call people fools for supporting brick and mortar stores. I am well aware of the fact that I can get things cheaper online and I am well aware that it is the same merchandise, however, I am willing to pay a little more for the convenience of being able to run over to the store and pick something up that I need. Its just a personal preference. Recently, I also paid more for my cable then I had to and stuck with the smaller cable company over the larger Comcast. Was this because I am a fool... No it is because the competition is what makes the cable prices so low in my area and if everyone went with Comcast there would be no competition. I do not believe satellites are sufficient competition because a lot of people also desire to have a broadband connection with their cable. Sometimes people knowingly pay higher prices for a reason.

Re:Am I the only one

[hattig]

From the reviews, it seems that for anyone buying an OEM computer (where these cards are targetted initially) at least they'll be able to play the latest games reasonably using this configuration, and it is a decent brand of graphics. And Doom3 and HL2 are playable with these cards, and they are the current high-end of DX9 gaming, negating your latter point.

Sadly it won't hit retail until February. Which isn't good for us casual gamers and silent-PC (passive heatsink graphics card) people who would be interested in this card for being cheap and good-enough. ATI's X300SE and X300, the performance and price competitors to the 6200TC 16/32 respectively are available now. Of course, when the 6200TC hits retail, expect it to be available for $69/$89 online.

Re:Am I the only one

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Agreed for the most part, but they are a necessary evil, even for /.'ers. A case in point is last night, when I installed a new PS in my box - during the course of this, I somehow nubbed a connection on my Jet 4, making the fan go as slow as it possibly can (less than 2K RPM according to MBM). This made the CPU heat spike up to 60 C under load. My wife, bless her heart, asked me if I could take the CPU heatsink out of an 1.2 GHz P4 box that I have and use that on the 3 GHz HT box. I explained to her that this would be throwing an ice cube onto a fire, and started to check the wiring from the fan switch to the heatsink. I can't see anything pulled, frayed, etc, but it wants to run at a snail's pace, so I am left with a few options here:

1) Forego WoW, Desert Combat, using iTunes to update my iPod, or any other task tht will make the CPU run at 100% or close to it (this is regrettably not an option)

2) Go to newegg and get a replacement one there, pay for expedited shipping, and hope that they ship it today, so I get it tomorrow. Christmas is always more of a diceroll to get something reliably out the door. Last time I used newegg a month ago, they had a problem with their warehouse shipping system and orders were backed up for 6 days. I love these guys, but now can't stake my kids' lives on them shipping the same day as placing the order, especially with 5 shipping days till ho ho ho time.

3. Go to CrapUSA and get one there.

Places like this are good in a pinch, assuming you know exactly what you want and don't need to ask a single question. Once you open your mouth, you are doomed. I found one there online that should get me by without actively cooking my processor (yeah I know they should shut themselves down if they get too hot, but does any rational person want to bet on that?), or cringing every time I enter Azeroth with the thought that I am causing hidden damage to my shiny new P4. So in short, I reserved one, and will pick it up on the way to our company holiday party tonight. Places like this do survive on the general public, but it is nice to have them in our midsts for a rainy day. PS - happy holidays to all!

Re:Am I the only one

[Nimey]

You can't get a GF4 card in PCI Express, that's why, and most PCI-E motherboards don't have AGP slots.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. It's a shame I don't have mod points.

Re:Am I the only one

[ionpro]

... because obviously, 45.9 fps in Half-Life 2 at 1024x768 is unplayable. And just look at those screenshots! All those missing features! [/sarcasm]

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you said that backwards?
Can't imagine a config, short of totally borked drivers, that would run DX9 mode faster than DX8.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

I too like to support small competitors that put service over cheapness, but that doesn't describe Best Buy and Circuit City. Paying a markup to support a local mom and pop store where the owner wants to give you good service can be a good idea, but it is foolish to pay an unnecessary premium to a national chain that cuts every corner, overcharges its customers, and underpays its employees.

Old idea in new cards..

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Covered on TheReg.

AGP?

[MSTCrow5429]

"...truely take advantage of the PCI Express bus by using system RAM to store textures."

Isn't this just a so-called feature of the AGP spec originally that nearly no one used because performance sucked and it was cheaper to just place the RAM onboard to begin with?

Re:AGP?

[d_strand]

Isn't this just a so-called feature of the AGP spec originally that nearly no one used because performance sucked and it was cheaper to just place the RAM onboard to begin with?

Kinda... the whole idea with AGP was to use system memory instead of überexpensive RAM on the videocard that was avaliable at the time. Unfortunately (?) memory prices started a 3-year dive at the same time the first systems where introduced, making the whole thing unnecessary.

Re:AGP?

[10Ghz]

But still, this features has been available in all AGP-cards (OCI-Express as well). Why are they now telling people that this is a new and exiting technology, when in fact it has been around since AGP was introduced?

Am I missing something here? What's the difference between TurboCache and regural AGP-texturing?

Re:AGP?

[hattig]

AGP texturing sucked because AGP->System transfers were abysmally slow. PCIe doesn't have this problem. Hence it works well on modern games.
It also seems to be more advanced than mere AGP texturing.

Re:AGP?

[Alan Cox]

SiS made extensive use of it on cards like the 6326, although note that the 6326 also did this for PCI as well as AGP. Ironically this seems to work very well again with modern games as they use shaders and so need a lot less texture bandwidth anyway.

Re:AGP?

[10Ghz]

AGP texturing sucked because AGP->System transfers were abysmally slow. PCIe doesn't have this problem.

So this isn't in any way "new", this is simply AGP-texturing with more bandwidth.

It also seems to be more advanced than mere AGP texturing.

How so?

Everything old is new again?

[B5_geek]

This feels like Deja Vu all over again.

I thought we were supposed to hate and graphic card that uses System RAM ?!?!

My guess is either:

a) Nvidia & ATi want more profit/card then they are getting. Onboard RAM is expensive so let's try this trick again.

b) PCI-E is honestly and truly better able to keep up with the proformance and memory requirements that moden gamers require in a gaming box.

I think it's all about the $$.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when has it ever not been about the $$$?

Re:Everything old is new again?

[puetzk]

I think that both a&b are true. PCI-E really is better at pulling this off than AGP, resulting in a card that runs HL2/Doom3 decently for $100

Doesn't exactly sound like a bad thing to me... no, it's not as fast as the $200 version. Surprise, surprise.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't be all about the $$ because if they want me to splash out on one of these then they would have to open up their drivers. They don't seem to want to do that, I ditched 3d and stuck with 8MB ATI rage cards (even on desktops), which sucks because I want to buy Doom3.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[BorgHunter]

Of course it's all about the money. Since when is anything that companies do NOT about money?

Re:Everything old is new again?

[eric_brissette]

If a graphics card could use system ram *and do it well*, then I wouldn't mind, as long as the card was cheaper because of it.

I'd gladly pay for another 512mb of system ram in a new machine if I knew that the video card would make efficient use of it. Especially if that meant a price drop in video cards, which would allow me to upgrade more often.

I guess that all hinges on whether the performance is good enough, and how much card prices would drop by not having memory on the card.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get usable (but not brilliant) 3D from a Radeon 9250 or lower using OSS drivers. I run a Radeon 9200 at home, and it's fine for Quake III and friends.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[B5_geek]

But the reason that it's a bad idea (as posted by several others already), is that system ram is MUCH slower then video ram.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Foktip]

Its like that Radeon IGP thing that most laptops have now! They only tell you that the thing has "512mb" of ram, and then you realize its using a lot of that for the video card, so when it runs out of ram on relatively simple games you have to buy more ram. I can sort of understand doing that in a laptop where theres space/heat concerns, but in a desktop? Why not just use CHEAPER RAM? Instead, they stress out the PCI express subsystem, which will probably result in something horrible, like 4x less the performance, making it crappier than my GeForce 3. Oh wait... :P

Re:Everything old is new again?

[stupidfoo]

But the reason that it's a bad idea (as posted by several others already), is that system ram is MUCH slower then video ram.

How so? The benchmarks seem to show that this isn't true. The problem before was that the motherboards memory bandwidth was much lower than what the memory could support. This is now not the case. This isn't like the AGP slot which had a total bandwidth of a little over 520MB/s, which is one of the reasons that AGP cards using system memory were pretty slow.

According to Kingston:
# Peak bandwidth for PC2100 DIMMs
(8 Bytes) x (266 MHz Data Rate) = 2,128 MB/second which is rounded to 2,100 MB/second or 2.1 GB/second.

# Peak bandwidth for PC2700 DIMMs
(8 Bytes) x (333 MHz Data Rate) = 2,664 MB/second or 2.7 GB/second.

# Peak bandwidth for PC3200 DIMMs
(8 Bytes) x (400 MHz Data Rate) = 3,200 MB/second or 3.2 GB/second.

With that much bandwidth the bottleneck in the systems this kind of card is designed for will be elsewhere.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[kesuki]

First off for those who didn't RTFA the card DOES have Fast RAM onboard 16MB of it -- which hasn't been enough to run a 3-d game in a long time, so it's capable of keeping textures (and only textures) in system ram. This is really only a 'good' solution for the 'value' segment. Frankly I think the boys at Nvidia have been feeling the crunch as thier 'low end' cards have been 'too good' and not enough people are paying for 'premium' cards. You can find 128MB video cards for as low as $35 online nowadays.... Yeah they're 'value' segment cards, and if you want better framerate you're gonna need to drop $$
on a better card, but the fact is that $35 card will probably run most games almost as good as a 2 year old $400 card. They're trying to enter a 'new era' of more profitable gpus, with the low end using 'special features' like this to strip off RAM and make them undesirable to serious gamers, but 'acceptable' to the clueless masses.
Most people (I've built computers for) say they don't care about PC gaming, and in general the only ones using them for games are their kids.
So I doubt features like this will really catch on, The real pushers of substandard technology (the dell's and gateways of the world) already have the entire memory of the card 'shared' from system ram. This solution requires 16MB of faster graphic ram, and then shares out from system ram, it might make it into some fo gateway and dell's mid range offerings, but other than that I don't see much potential for this technology. I certaintly won't be using it...

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Azreal]

I wish people would just understand that it's not a gaming card. It's basically for joe schmoe who surfs the web, types up some stuff and happens to play a game every great once and a while. Same joe schmoe who'd like to spend as little as possible for a machine to get this done. Before anyone says, "Yeah but you could just buy a mx400 or some old cheaper card..." Directx 8 is on the way out and is pretty bad when it comes to directx 9 games. Even with the budget line of graphics cards, you want it to be compatible with future games...not limited to games of the past. With that in mind, this card does directx9 w/sm3.0 at a cheap price point and hopefully will hold up for at least the forseeable directx9 future at joe schmoe's play quality (medium quality at around 30fps). A serious gamer wouldn't take a second look at this card, but for some oem or someone trying to build on the cheap, this is a good option.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Jarnis]

Oooo

3.2GB/sec

Um, high end cards push over 20GB/sec of stuff around. When each single pixel on the screen is mucked up by the card multiple times, the bandwidth requirement just skyrockets. This card will be seriously bottlenecked by slow RAM.

I do give 'em some credit - it DOES Have some onboard cache ram to hide the worst problems, but it will still be a dog. If not today, it will suck at the games of next year. Sucks for those who buy one computer every 3-5 years.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Octorian]

You know, there's more to memory performance than just throughput. Ever hear of latency?

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

why not look at it the easy way, it will play doom 3 and HL 2 just fine. And when I say just fine, I mean it will be at medium quality with over 30 fps, which means its perfect for almost all people. And at 1/5 to 1/6 the price of the high end, I think these people are coming off pretty well. The people this card works for will only be using it for the big name games that come out a few times a year and these cards have proven to be more than good enough to run the cream of the crop today.

I think what this really means is all those regular people who don:t have 500 dollars for a GPU can play the latest games today for 80 bucks. And then a year and a half down the road when it isn`t cutting it, upgrade to another 80 dollar card(the 350 dollar card of today). By the end of another year or year and a half, they have gotten 3 years of good gaming for very cheap, about 1/3 the price. I say they came out real well.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Jarnis]

I do not advocate 500$ GPUs. They do have their market (I use 6800GT myself), but for general gaming, I'd pick either 9800pro, X700pro or 6600GT. Every single one is under 300$. Most are under 250$. That *is* the best bang for buck. For 95% of gamers its idiotic to pay 100-200$ extra for that last 10-20% of performance, but at the same time it's just sensible to pay 200-250$ for a solid card that is fast when you buy it, and still servers you well 2-3 years *after* purchase.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Greyfox]

PCI-E is pretty damn snappy. I can run UT2004 at 1600x1200 with all the eye candy turned on and the only time I notice the framerate drop is when I'm doing tight turns in fast vehicles. This is with a mid-range ATI PCI-E card, though I doubt that the top of the line model would dramatically improve performance.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[KyleJacobson]

Its ALWAYS been about the $$, where have you been

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Chandon Seldon]

That's not PCI-E, that's your mid-range ATI card. AGP 8x has no problem with UT2004 at 1600x1200. I'd you could do it with AGP 4x too, but I don't think anyone ever made a 4x card fast (processor/ram wise) enough.

Re:Everything old is new again?

[Chandon Seldon]

Given the money that is saved on these, I'd expect that a low end one will add $40 to $50 to your new Dell. The up side is that you've ensured that you have a PCI-Express port - so you can move to a 6750GT (or whatever) when you need to.

This is assuming that "you" are a newb who'd buy a Dell for 3D gaming, but that comes up quite a bit.

revisionist leaders once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA's just announced GeForce 6200 cards with TurboCache - the first graphics cards that truely take advantage of the PCI Express bus by using system RAM to store textures."

BZZT, WRONG. Here is the first PCI Express video card that stores textures in system memory.

(For that matter, 3Dlabs were the first to release an _AGP_ card that stored textures in system memory: anyone remember the Oxygen chip?)

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Here [3dlabs.com] is the first PCI Express video card that stores textures in system memory."

Depends on what you mean by that. 3Dlabs cards have virtual memory support to store data in system memory, but they also have up to 640MB or so of memory on the graphics card.

As surprised as I am that latency didn't kill their performance on this card, it does look like nvidia have a winner for the low-end of the market by putting all their textures in system memory. Of course it will probably be useless for next years' games when a mid-range gaming card has maybe 256MB of on-board RAM running at 30GB/s.

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[imsabbel]

oxygen was after the i740, iirc, which used agp texturing, too.
And oxygen was slow as hell even with textures in local memory. You needed 2 or 4 to be competitive...

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[psergiu]

Anyone remember a nice blue round computer named O2 from Silicom Graphics ? Guess where it stored the textures ?

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[jandrese]

The difference is that the O2 was closer to a giant graphics card than a traditional PC aarchitecturally. That little blue cube could push bits around like nobodys business. PCs in the past (and probably in the future) have always sucked at moving bulk data around in comparision. That's why PC video cards have been forced to stick the memory on the card itself, because the rest of the system was too slow to keep up.

PCI-Express is supposed to change that, but that's the same thing they said about AGP, and you see what kind of reputation the AGP cards that use system memory have.

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[log0n]

Silicom Graphics? Nope, don't remember a company by that name...

8*)

Re:revisionist leaders once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

The marketing blurb is poorly written. The GeForce 6200 cards are able to RENDER to system memory as well as read from it. The first Nvidia card that could store texture data in system RAM (specifically, AGP memory) was the NV4, so there's nothing new about that.

This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Kosi]

And these morons at Nvidia try to sell it as

a) new - WTF, abusing system RAM for
graphics RAM is really old!

and

b) faster - BS, direct attached RAM on the
card itself can't be outperformed
over whatever bus the card sits in!

instead of what it really is: a bad and old trick to save costs for real graphics memory.

They even encourage the card manufacturers to conceal the fact of the crippeled RAM size, they tell them to write "supports up to 128 MB" instead of "has only 16 MB" on the packages.

The bad thing is that there are enough idiots out there who will buy this shit that Nvidia will get away with it.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[smithyBelong]

yes, i know, and the worst thing is several compant objects don't even work on this card. At least according to the tests

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[genneth]

Errr... Thanks for the helpful comments. And good work there by the mods, modding this up. If you read the Anandtech review, all the way to the end (yes, yes, /. RTFA never happens...) you'll find that NV are forcing packagers to declare the supports up to and the size of the onboard memory, much to the chargrin of sysbuilders and dell (who don't produce computers, just pieces of shit). The point of this card is the price, and the fact that it fully supports DX9 and perhaps even beyond (when it gets defined), whilst being cheap as hell. It will just be slow, but still provide the ability. For those who think that they are too l33t w/ their graphics cards for this to matter, just remember that the faster everyone ELSE gets DX9 compatible cards, the faster game developers start fully using or requiring DX9 compliance.

I long for the day that OpenGL 2 is standard...

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[smithyBelong]

You don't know what you are saying. Opengl will never be the standard. Because it has been crippled from the beginning. We all know that Symantec and BMW are the main developpers of openGL2 now, last week, during a meeting, they talked about quiting this opengl project.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Anonymous Coward]

b) faster - BS, direct attached RAM on the
card itself can't be outperformed
over whatever bus the card sits in!'

Since when is it trying to out perform any decent card!?!?. Personally I'd by this just for my sister, she doesnt want 80+ fps like me, just for it to look nice and not be a slideshow, so if these benchmarks hold true I might consider ditching her old piece of junk and get one of these.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[MikeBabcock]

The first Intel AGP graphics cards used the same trick and some reviewers actually claimed that they'd out-perform other graphics cards from the likes of 3dfx, etc.

That didn't happen by a long shot -- AGP never kept up with on-board memory speeds.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[duggy_92127]

...instead of what it really is: a bad and old trick to save costs for real graphics memory.

But see, you've missed the point entirely. This card is billed as a "value" card; it's not for us, it's for people (read: OEMs) who want to put a $60 card into a machine. Using this "trick", with the bandwidth that PCI-E provides, gets the cards unprecedented performance at that price point.

PRICE is the priority, here, not performance. They're using this old trick with these new tools (PCI-E) to get good performance at the target price.

Doug

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Kosi]

NV are forcing packagers to declare the supports up to and the size of the onboard memory

I did RTFA on the (german) Heise newsticker (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/54284) before, and there you can read that Nvidia would encourage their partners not to reveal the real memory size, but rather only tell "supports up to ... MB".

No sentient person would want DX9 in a card that is too slow for these DX9 features and furthermore steals RAM from the system whilst slowing the CPU.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Kosi]

it's not for us

I'm no gamer, my TNT2-64 card (cheapest 1,5V AGP card I could get in October when I had to buy a new mobo) does everything I want as fast as I want. For nearly all non-gaming stuff a "normal" user does, you don't need more graphics performance.

You can basically split the people in two groups:

Gamers/Graphics Professionals/CAD - They need real strong 3D graphics cards, this crippeled stuff is too weak for them.

Rest - Needs (nearly) no 3D graphics power, even this crippeled stuff is overkill for them.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Kosi]

Since when is it trying to out perform any decent card!?!?

Since they call it "Turbo Cache". "Turbo" and "Cache" are synonyms for something that makes you go faster than you could without. They want you to believe this was something good that improves performance, while it is the exact opposite.

If you don't play 3D games, buy the cheapest card you can get, but if you play, then get a decent[*] one.

[*] "decent" meaning a mid-priced one (last year's top model)

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[duggy_92127]

You can basically split the people in two groups:

I used to think this was true, too, but recently I've seen otherwise. I work with a group of about 10 people, doing software development. Two of us are gamers, and have sick high-end machines. The others basically only do this stuff at work, and go home and do other things.

However, FOUR of those other people are shown interest in playing DOOM3 or Half-Life2, and borrowed said games from the gamers. We found that their machines were woefully inadequate to play them, though.

Thus, in this admittedly small sample, I'm seeing a surprisingly large number of people who shouldn't have a sick high-end machines, but would ALSO like to play a modern game from time to time. I think graphics cards like these are the perfect choice for those people.

Doug

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[Jagasian]

The card cost $79, which means the consumer saves money. Sure it won't perform as good as an onboard memory card, but for that price, it is a good card.

Re:This is just a crippeled graphics card!

[DoubleReed]

They allready started pitching this last year. I was looking at laptops at Microcenter and the salesman starts making his pitch. First he says the video card has 64mb (it was 32), then he starts going off about how the video card can use system ram so that will take care of any performance problems due to low ram.
Wow... anyway, ya don't buy from Microcenter their salesmen will lie to your face and the "sales" that they have are actually just marking down to the regular price you could get at Costco.

Not the first card to take advantage of the PCI bu

[Anonymous Coward]

the first graphics cards that truely take advantage of the PCI Express bus by using system RAM to store textures."

Isn't system ram 50% slower than video ram?

The first graphics card to take advantage of the PCI bus is the Nvidia 6600 GT with its SLi technology.

Not for me, thanks.

[gandell]

Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer. Shucks, I don't even play Solitaire. I'm a web developer / graphic designer who dabbles in 3D applications such as Nasa's World Wind. Having said that...

I wouldn't purchase this card for myself. True, I don't need a whole lot of power. But (call me crazy), I've always preferred to have an actual video card with actual video RAM on it to handle graphics applications (large or small texture loads...in my case, mainly small). I prefer not to have Windows tell me that I'm only using 3/4 of my physical RAM due to my video card taking part of it for textures in World Wind or Celestia.

Am I alone in this?

Re:Not for me, thanks.

[Scott Wood]

You can use the money that you save by not including obscene amounts of memory on the graphics card to increase the amount of system RAM you have; that way, you'll have as much available RAM as before when using 3D apps, and even more when not.

Furthermore, there hopefully would be some kind of user-controlled limit (as there is with AGP) on how much system memory is allowed to be used for this sort of thing. By insisting that the RAM be on the card itself, you merely take away the ability to change that limit without changing the hardware.

Re:Not for me, thanks.

[man_ls]

Why not make cards with upgradable memory?

It wouldn't be that difficult to mount, say, a single or pair of DDR sockets towards the top of the card.

Have it ship with, say, 1 stick of 256MB or whatever.

Want an upgrade? Go buy a few more sticks and swap em out.

Re:Not for me, thanks.

[puetzk]

It would be quite difficult to make such sockets work at the sort of speeds that VRAM usually gets run at though...

Truely?

[AyeRoxor!]

Interesting.

This is not so bad

[GeLeTo]

This TurboCache thing is much beter than the original AGP texturing idea (that Intel used to push with their i740 chipsets).

Imagine that when texturing instead of using 128 bit bus to the on-card memory - the card now uses a 128 bit bus to the on-card memory PLUS(!!!) another 128 bit bus to the local memory thus giving you higher bandwidth for the same cost.

Of course this can be used to boost a bit the speed of cards with crippled (slow, 64 bit) memory bus, but in the end - you get what you paid for.

Re:This is not so bad

[10Ghz]

Imagine that when texturing instead of using 128 bit bus to the on-card memory - the card now uses a 128 bit bus to the on-card memory PLUS(!!!) another 128 bit bus to the local memory thus giving you higher bandwidth for the same cost.

Isn't that the way it's done in AGP-texturing? Difference is, that these days vid-cards have so much on-board RAM that it's not really needed. But if you try to store too much textures, the ones that do not fit in the RAM on the vid-card are stored on the system-RAM and are accessed through the AGP-bus (PCI-Express these days).

Really, this "Turbocache" seems to me like an euphenism for "we were so cheap that we equipped these cards with miniscule amounts of RAM! Therefore most of the textures are stored in your system-RAM, since they can't fit in the RAM on the vid-card! This is not a bug, it's a feature!"

A more straightforward article

[Anonymous Coward]

There is another geforce 6200 review that is shorter and to the point and explains where this card is targetted.

Re:This is just a crippled graphics card!

[hattig]

This card will probably end up being the number one card for OEMs to use in their not-shit systems. Hardly a 'moronic' target market for nVidia.

Yes, having only 16/32 or 64 MB of graphics memory on a card is cheaper than having 128 or 256 MB of graphics memory on the card.

Also nVidia is forcing the sellers to write how much local memory there is on the card on the packaging.

I think that anyone getting a low-end computer with this card will be happy with the gaming performance. Then again, I read the reviews, and you clearly did not. Also it is a nice cheap card for Linux users to purchase, given the nice nVidia Linux drivers.

I have one reservation. How much is the cost of 32MB of 350MHz DDR memory on a 64-bit bus (5.6GB/s), compared to 128MB of slower (e.g., 200MHz) DDR memory on a 128-bit bus (6.4GB/s)?

Hopefully there's no video RAM problems...

[nvrrobx]

I'm hoping they fixed their quality problems on the 6600GT line. Between myself and a friend, 5 cards so far, all with bad video RAM. Go ahead, fire up 3DMark and see if your screen pixelates...

I ended up getting a Radeon X700 Pro instead, and I had said I'd never buy another ATI card because of their crappy drivers.

Re:Hopefully there's no video RAM problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the RAM installation up to the manufacturer, not nVidia? What brand did you buy? I got an XFX 6600GT and it works great.

Re:Hopefully there's no video RAM problems...

[nvrrobx]

Just for posterity's sake:

Four dead XFX PCI-E 6600GT's, and an eVGA...

You apparently got lucky with your XFX.

Idiotic.

[mario_grgic]

The whole point of video card is to be seamles, to speed things up, and to make system perform better. I don't want a video card that's going to "eat" half a gigabyte of my system RAM. It's a huge resource hit. I pray to God this is not the direction the "future" is headed.
Use the damn dedicated RAM for your video card and don't eat system resources.

Re:Idiotic.

[Game_Ender]

If you RTFA, you will find that at most it only uses about 128MG of system ram. It even preforms pretty decently too (with all the latest directX features on ).

Re:Idiotic.

[mario_grgic]

I've read the FA and if this is deemed acceptable by the consumers, it's only a matter of time before they offer the "high end" version that takes half a gigabyte of your system RAM.

Re:Idiotic.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with that? It's better than having half a gig of memory on your video card that almost always sits idle while you run business apps.

What were you going to do with your RAM while you were playing video games anyway.

And a Bah Humbug to you too!

[Brian_Ellenberger]

Maybe mom and pop should buy a "homework" PC, so their snot nosed kid can pay for their own gaming machine some day.

Hmm, sounds like someone has issues.... I'm guessing Mom and Dad didn't spring for that new 386 back in the day? :)

Anyway your argument is rather silly and counterproductive. Plenty of kids (including me) played a ton of computer video games and still got straight-A's. However, me getting a C64 when I was 7 got me interested in computers in the first place. After playing around with the games I was curious about what else the thing could do. 20 years later I am Software Engineer. If my parents made the C64 a no-fun "homework only" machines things may have turned out very differently for me.

Now I'm not saying to let your kids run wild or spend $4000 on their computer, but kids don't respond well to being forced to do anything. For that matter, adults don't either. Kids are natually curious. If you open the door a little by making something fun, they have a tendency to run right in.

Brian Ellenberger

P.S. There are games which are educational and fun at the same time, mostly those with some historical background. Pirates! and Civilization come to mind from when I was much younger.

Re:And a Bah Humbug to you too!

[plover]

My son and I built his most recent computer. We started a while ago with a leftover Athlon 1200 of mine and a $20 "refurb" motherboard, and other various junk I had in the bin. Over the past couple of years virtually every component has been replaced through Christmas gifts, "great grades" gifts, birthday presents, etc., and he's purchased some parts with his summer job money. I think the only component he still has that he started with is a hand-me-down keyboard. My only restriction on him so far has been to tell him I'm not paying to replace any component he destroys by overclocking, nor would I give him a replacement for Christmas.

I think it's great that he gets excited when he receives a couple of sticks of PC3200 RAM, and runs off to install them. He knows what's going on inside his machine, and is learning how to troubleshoot it as well. His skills got him his summer job as an intern where he built and upgraded computers in our lab.

And yeah, he plays games. A lot of games. (If his grades were suffering as a result, that would change, but they're not.) Games drive his desire to upgrade his machine, and the upgrades drive the desire to know how to perform them.

I compare my situation with that of a good friend. My friend is just as capable of building a computer as I am, but instead he bought his son a laptop for Christmas. It's his intent to provide a "homework machine." If it can play games, fine, but with the shared-64MB graphics chip in it, it's not going to play many of them. Gaming wasn't one of his goals.

My point is while his kid may be thrilled to get the laptop, he's not going to learn anything from it. Laptop upgrades are notoriously expensive to upgrade, and there's usually very little to upgrade in any case. In my opinion, he threw away the chance to teach his son anything about computers, and simply made it harder for his kid to learn it on his own. Sure, he's got a laptop -- but that's it. "Here's your laptop with pre-installed XP and Office, now write an English paper."

AGP confusion

[losec]

I need a filter_user_comments.pl.
So far, only negative comments, from user who do not even understand PCI-e, but still has to make a comment, about the technology (by comparing it as if it was PCI or AGP (PCI-e has bandwidth far beyond PCI/AGP)).
Last, the AGP aperture feature, has nothing todo with PCI-e.

I hoped this round of comments would debate, and enlight little more about the future of PCI-e. It seems the technology isn't just about replacing AGP(PCI).

Not if they like cars

[WillerZ]

Add a turbo -> adds turbo lag.

I think this is a pretty good anme actually, as the effect is going to be much the same. Comparing a card with TurboCache to a regular one is like comparing a Golf GTi to a Ferrari 430. One is cheap and uses a turbo to give you the power, with some penalty in the form of lag, and the other gives you all the power you want.

Me, I'll wait for the supercharged one.

Phil

tangential

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, maybe that's what they SHOULD do... but the argument is whether parents that have already disobeyed your moral judgment and decided to indulge the brat should expect to get what they're promised.

I personally find this kind of marketing despicable. Maybe parents are trying to make up for something, or maybe their kid wants to be a fighter pilot and fly all the flight sims out there...who knows?

Then they buy a machine sold as suitable for gaming, which isn't.

I got a moral problem with that. Do you?

NVidia is high, or thinks we're high

[dzym]

At the price range of the TC64, one might as well just go get a Radeon 9800 Pro.

First the SLI, now the TC crap, and the decline in quality of the Nforce chipset after the shining pinnacle that was the Nforce2Ultra, NVidia is really backsliding. Looks like I will refrain from buying NVidia products for the next while.

Does it cause SDL to freeze under 2.6?

[HiThere]

I'll grant you that's a driver issue, but since the manufacturer insists on maintaining control, then they are also responsible for any and all driver bugs.

If they're the only one's who can fix it, then it's their responsibility.

The details are the difference

[GunFodder]

Games generally don't require a high-end video card; they just look a lot better. Far Cry looks absolutely amazing running at 1600x1200 with lots of filtering. Likewise Doom3, Half-Life 2, etc. And frame rates are much steadier.

I know the difference because I played these games with an older high end card (GF 4400 TI) and then upgraded to a newer high end card (GF 6800 GT) and the difference is huge. The cost was too, but if you amortize that over the lifetime of the card it's less than a cup of coffee a day :)

pci-express

[Internet_Communist]

pci express is nice and all but right now I don't think there's ANY amd boards with it, and you're basically stuck with an LGA 755 board, and I believe there's a few socket 478 boards with it, but still, it's not exactly super common. I'm surprised so many cards are being released in the pci-express format, unless I'm missing something here, agp is still what most of us have.

SGI O2 uniform memory architecture - 1996

[Anonymous Coward]

The SGI O2 (uh, from 1996) used main memory as frame buffer and texture memory. The O2 had 2.1GB of low-latency memory bandwidth (again, 8 years ago).

http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/o2arch.ht ml

Re:SGI O2 uniform memory architecture - 1996

[NovySan]

I'm glad somebody brought that up!

Re:SGI O2 uniform memory architecture - 1996

[tarpitcod]

Exactly what I was thinking - UMA on the SGI O2. This has been talked about and used on PC's before too: http://www.byte.com/art/9607/sec18/art5.htm There's one thing this may work well with: Has anyone tried opening say a 16384x16384*32 bitmap on a PC with a typical $500 ATI / NVIDIA (Say X800 / 6800) card. Try doing a smooth continuous zoom / roaming. Can you do it smoothly at say 60 fps at 1280x1024? In theory - you'd only need say 1280x1024*4 (32bpp) * 60 bytes per second of bandwidth - That's 300 MB/sec. Can you do that on an AGP card? I think you can probably do it on an O2 without a problem. --Tarp

Nvidia screws customers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok Tech community. Just pass the word not to get this card or the MX range. "Turbocache" isn't really
a boost but is a buzz word and Geforce4 MX has more to do with a Geforce 2 then a Geforce 4. Nvidia knew it would be able to buzz word these products and catch the casual consumer. Some will say these customers deserve it but I know companys must take care on them and not screw them. People do trust after all...

Re:This is just a crippled graphics card!

[ionpro]

It turns out that the memory isn't the part that cranks the costs up. RAM is pretty damn cheap; the difference between memory costs for 64MB and 128MB is negligable. But to add a 128-bit memory bus, you have to add more layers to the card, which boosts production costs significantly. With the 32-bit bus on these cards, a 3-layer video card becomes possible, rather than 6-8 layers on something like a 6800GT.

Can render directly to system memory???

[Zinho]

I noticed some interesting text on the graphics: "Can render directly to system memory with 100% efficiency"

Isn't this a fix for one of the 3D rendering artists' biggest complaints? I don't do a lot of it now, but back when I was working in a shop that did rendering of CG animation our 3D geeks constantly complained that our graphics cards didn't have as much bandwidth out to the system as they did through their video out port. They even tossed around the idea of doing video capture on the graphics card output becasue it might save time (didn't try it, couldn't get capture card purchase approved).

Is anyone qualified to comment on whether this is just advertizing glitz or if they've really solved the bandwidth-back-to-system problem? I know some people that would really like to find out.

Does this mean....

[Chiisu]

that 512MB video cards won't be hiting anytime soon, except for AGP? If my system can have 1-2GB of RAM, then my video card would need very little on its own.....

Re:This is just a crippled graphics card!

[hattig]

Ah yeah, good point! I should have thought about that. I did think about it reducing the pin-count (well, the ball grid count or whatever) on the GPU. Also smaller graphics cards will be possible. And good for laptops.

Not so much with the true

[daVinci1980]

Because making the graphics card go the whole way back to the system is a lot slower than just using RAM right on the card?

That's actually not really true. The whole point of PCIe and the next generation of cards is that with a solid bus, access to system RAM can be within an order of magnitude of video RAM.

Additionally, the

Not so much with the 'true'

[daVinci1980]

(Yeah, apparently I hit 'enter' a little quickly today. Full post follows...)

Because making the graphics card go the whole way back to the system is a lot slower than just using RAM right on the card?

That's actually not really true. The whole point of PCIe and the next generation of cards is that with a solid bus, access to system RAM can be within an order of magnitude of video RAM.

Yes it will still be slower then DRAM on the card, but the programmer time saved will allow for performance improvements in other places.

The point of PCIe is to add full-duplex fast bus access. This allows numerous things like (for example) using the GPU as a number of massively parallel multi-processors. In the past, this wasn't really feasible for games, because AGP was so painfully slow transferring backwards, and because if you *were* transferring backwards you couldn't be transferring forwards.

There are other problems with the ever spiralling amount of memory on video cards as well. For example, how much system memory do you need to run a video card with 512M of ram at full capacity? It's a lot more then you think. If you only have a gig of system RAM, windows is going to freak out whenever an application creates a device using the renderer, because one single 512M allocation just occurred, and windows gets pretty upset when half of memory is actively in use.

Sounds like a cop-out

[default luser]

Sounds to me like AGP DiME with another name. Anyone else remember the i740 and it's complete lack of texture memory? Yeah, that was a great idea, since it still had to have an onboard 8MB framebuffer. Oh, surprise, surprise, so does the 6200 TC (32MB). Oh yeah, that 32MB is probably also why the card sucks for AA...it doesn't have the memory to spare.

So, let's see. You're buying an expensive system with PCIe and dual-channel DDR, plus an expensive CPU, and then you pair it with this excuse for a video card? What a joke.

On the realistic end, has anyone stopped to think about this: the video card is apt to mooch at least 128MB of system memory...this is going to make performance in games pretty sketchy with a total of 512MB memory, a more likely amount of memory for a budget machine. Thus, you have to bump up to 1GB ram just to appease your 6200 TC and leave yourself enough ram for (insert huge game here).

Think about it, if you price the difference between 1GB and 512MB, even if it's cheap ram, you're out ~$75. That's enough of a difference to buy yourself a lower-midrange card like the 5700 or the x600. Plus, you get the benefit of your video card not sapping gigabytes of precious main memory bandwidth.

Best passively cooled card?

[Kris_J]

I notice the lack of fan. Is this the best passively cooled video card on the market? It's better than everything I've currently got, so when I do my next upgrade it might be worth trying for a silent PC, instead of giving up and going for the fastest, loudest thing available. A nice Zalman 7000-series heatsink for the CPU and my gaming PC doesn't have to sound like a plane taking off.

6200 watts?

[Sean Johnson]

The first thing I construed the headline to mean was this card used up 6200 watts and was named TurboCache! Can you imagine! That would be INSANE!

No fan!

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be no fan in these pictures!

These are probably going to be good for silent PCs :)

They will also probably not overheat on hot days when I use 3D programs. Like my current nvidia card overheats.

You missed the TCO argument

[lakeland]

If price was the only issue, you'd be right. But for many people their time is valuable, their setup is valuable, the tiny risk to their data of an upgrade has a value.

Lets take it as true that upgrading every two years means you, on average, have a better computer for less money. But, it usually takes about a week to migrate windows to a new computer -- product activation keys, setting up all the new software, etc. Once you give those extras a reasonable value, you suddenly see that it is no longer an advantage for an average person to upgrade every two years.

Now, tinkerers (by which I include anybody reading slashdot) are a whole different category. They have a cost of zero (or even a benefit) to setting up a new computer and so are best to buy cheap and buy often.

PS: Having said that, I'm still pissed that my MX440 can't play a 3D rendered board game -- the mouse jerks around the screen :-(

Low-cost nForce4 solution to compete with GMA 900

[MojoStan]

I thought we were supposed to hate and graphic card that uses System RAM ?!?!

I think we still are, but I don't think this product is targeted at us. NVIDIA's web page for GeForce 6200 with TurboCache technology describes it as a product "for entry-level PCs." Also, I think this product (when paired with nForce4) might be NVIDIA's low-cost PCI Express answer to Intel's integrated GMA 900 graphics.

Ever since Intel's 810 chipset, almost all "entry-level" platforms have included integrated graphics with "shared" memory architectures. Intel has dominated this category (in sales) and this continues with their current PCI Express platforms with integrated GMA 900 graphics. Note that GMA 900 is (barely) DirectX 9 compatible.

NVIDIA's nForce4 chipsets with PCI Express, which are just starting appear in stores, don't have a version with integrated graphics. If NVIDIA can offer to OEMs an nForce4 (for Athlon 64 and Sempron) + NVIDIA 6200 w/TurboCache bundle that's competitively priced with Intel's 915G chipset, then we might see more big-name computer makers selling low-cost Athlon 64/Sempron systems.

Sapphire 9600 XT Ultimate

[Ryan C.]

Here's a review. Funny you should mention Zalman, this card comes with one of their heatpipe coolers on it. Quite a bit faster, but also nearly twice the price.

-Ryan

Re:Sapphire 9600 XT Ultimate

[Kris_J]

You can bung a Zalman on lots of cards, but cards that need something that large still dump a lot of heat into the case that you have to shift. Small, simple, passive is much healthier if you have, say, an Antec Phantom fanless power supply.

AGP texture upload speed increase?

[BrianSharpe]

Hi Guys Does anyone know if this will increase AGP texture upload speeds? ie, Textures being swapped from the system memory to the local on-card memory. I work on an app where texture upload speed is a big factor in performance.

AGP ?

[great_snoopy]

The system's memory can also be used for textures via AGP. This is one thing that made AGP "revolutionary" at his introduction time.

Re:original

[QQoicu2]

how does this work? i put forth a legitimate criticism of the site, without intention of malice or shit-disturbing, and i get a troll?