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Video cards using TurboCache
On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:57:33 -0500, Peabody
wrote: A while back I got some excellent advice here about upgrading versus getting a new system (still in the learning phase on that), and one of the new-system suggestions included a low-end PCI-e video card using something called TurboCache. I believe I may have been the one that gave you that advise a few months back, though things have changed somewhat in the past little bit. If you're looking at a low-cost solution, then an nVidia TurboCache design isn't a bad card, but now the cost advantage has mostly evaporated. I'm now seeing regular GeForce 6200 cards selling for only $10 more than 6200 TurboCache cards. Previously the difference was most like $60 or $70. Apparently this involves reducing the ram on the card to something like 32MB, and using system ram for the rest of the "128MB" of video ram. Apparently this is made possible by the high-speed bi-directional transfers available through PCI-e 16x. Yup, that's about it. The vast majority of the time your video card is only using a rather small amount of memory (usually less than 16MB), so that can be stored in the on-board memory. When more memory is needed the video card can swap in and out memory from the main system memory. Pretty much the same concept as a processor's SRAM cache, except that we're talking about larger but slower memory here. But is this just deja vu all over again? Is this just "integrated video" on a separate card? Sort of yes, except that with integrated video you tended to use ONLY main system memory. With TurboCache you're using MOSTLY memory on the video card and only occasionally going to main memory when needed. I thought that the big problem with integrated video was not so much the use of the ram per se, but rather the sharing of the memory bus, and the slowdown that produced. For most applications the "slowdown" is lost in the noise these days, less than 1%. Where you really take a performance hit is in games, and there the performance hit can be quite large. However now that a regular GeForce 6200 costs only about $60-$70 while the TurboCache ones are running at about $50-$60, the difference in price is small enough that it's probably worth while spending the few extra $$$'s for MUCH better 3D performance. In the future 3D performance is likely to see more use outside of games and high-end workstation applications, so this $10 is a small investment for the future. If that's right, how is a Turbocache card better than something like an integrated ATI Radeon Express 200? Well, at least it has 32MB on the card. So let me ask this. If no gaming is involved, is the use of system ram unlikely to happen often? With 2D applications the use of system RAM would be quite rare. Would playback of DivX, Xvid, MPEG-2, HD video require the use of the system ram? Probably not, or at least not often enough to make any difference that could be measured by a benchmark, let alone any difference that you would actually *feel*. ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
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