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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."
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. :)
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Wouldn't it make more sense to buy a 6 month to year old card that has on board (and *faster*) memory?
...yup...
``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?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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?
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 $$.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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.
Maybe mom and pop should buy a "homework" PC, so their snot nosed kid can pay for their own gaming machine some day.
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.
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.