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Heavy Gear March 2005 • Vol.5 Issue 3 Page(s) 33 in print issue |
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TurboCache The Shark Tank by Alex "Sharky" Ross |
 Having spent the holidays playing Half-Life 2 in 1,600 x 1,200 with 8X AF and 4X AA on dual PCI-Express GeForce 6800 Ultras was fun while it lasted. Let's get back to reality though; nobody in his right mind is going to shell out over $1,000 for that sort of guilty pleasure! OK, maybe some folks as hooked on graphics as I am would, but for the most part that's La-La land. So I've retreated a few steps and gone back to basics—enter NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 with TurboCache. Late last year, NVIDIA snuck out a couple of cheap, yet very cheerful, additions to its lineup: The $129 6200 with TurboCache, sporting 13.6GBps of memory bandwidth, and the $99 part with 10.8GBps. Although the clock speeds are set at 350MHz (eCore) and 350MHz (memory), thanks to the use of the PCI-E bus, 8GBps of said bandwidth is on tap. The extra coming from 16MB of local memory connected to a single 32-bit channel running at 700MHz. In the $99 part, that would be an extra 2.8GBps worth of bandwidth. The $129 part has an extra 32-bit channel with 16MB of RAM making up the difference. Basically, you get either 96MB or 112MB frame buffer on a board that only has 16MB of 32MB of memory accessed via the PCI-E bus. Instead of needing large amounts of local memory to store render targets, such as back buffers, depth, or stencil buffers, environment mapping textures, or other graphics data, NVIDIA is implementing their TurboCache technique. A clever trick indeed. Although the price of RAM has come down a lot in recent years, it still costs a lot, especially when you're talking about 128 to 256MB of high-performance RAM used for graphics cards. So any cost-cutting that can be done is always welcome. Incorporating TurboCache meant a few necessary pipeline mods had to be made to include a new MMU (memory module unit), allowing boards to seamlessly allocate and deallocate surfaces in system memory and then read and write that memory more efficiently. Other enhancements were made to stifle the associated latency that occurs from system memory access across with the PCI-E interface.  Note that Intel and other 3D chip manufacturers have been doing something similar for years on embedded 3D graphics; it's just that their cores have been so lacking in features, the comparison didn't apply. This is not so with the NV4x architecture used in the 6200s. Trying to play Doom 3 was not a fun experience, but at least it did look good. Half-Life 2 was, however, more than playable at 1,024 x 768 at 50fps. Unreal Tournament 2004 at 1,024 x 768 had frame rates in the 40fps range, which is more than decent. Having a 4-pixel pipeline GPU with three vertex shaders and loaded with the full DX9 class features at the $99 mark at least means you can see everything the game developer intended: it just won't be quick. This is the correct approach, and it's worth noting that only the very complex 3D engines, that tax even mid-and high-range cards, are where the 6200 with TurboCache starts to play as if it's out of its league. Nonetheless, TurboCache makes for an interesting technique should NVIDIA ever see fit to employ it at higher-end levels. It'll certainly save some costs and possibly reduce latency at the same time. I'm not saying any hardcore gamer or 3D graphics-guzzling addict need apply, but for $99 it doesn't get much better than this. In brief benchmarks, it certainly beat out anything ATI's X300 had to offer. Just think, maybe you could bring one of these cards and sneakily install one on grandma's PC, which has onboard graphics that amount to the same as you eating a jar of leeches. That way when you visit her, you can always stay up late and not let your gaming habit suffer from withdrawal symptoms.  Disrupting Reuters' newswire with a cheery Christmas greeting at age six, Alex "Sharky" Ross became an avid computer user/abuser, eventually founding popular hardware testing/review Web site SharkyExtreme.com. Exposing shoddy manufacturing practices and rubbish-spouting marketing weasels while championing innovative products, illuminating new technology, and pioneering real-world testing methods was just a front for playing with the best toys. The site acquired, he left in 2001. A London native and London School of Economics graduate, Alex currently overclocks/tunes Porsche 996 Turbos with www.akkuratpgi.com when he's not tweaking PCs. Email me your throw-away, $99 granny-3D cards to sharky@cpumag.com |
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