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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."
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.
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*
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.
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. :)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
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?
Covered on TheReg.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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)
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?)
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.
Interesting.
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.
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.
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.