As we saw on the diagrams the more bandwidth you have the better you get. TurboCache uses this bandwidth effectively. For instance, GeForce 6200 with TurboCache uses 1 piece of memory and is 25% faster in most games when we compare it against ATI RADEON x300 SE with 4 physical pieces of memory. When we compare it against ATI RADEON x300LE the performance difference makes about 50%.
In case of the local memory it is directly attached to the frame buffer. Here the latency is longer that is why we need to design longer pipelines to cover for longer latency. Local frame buffer can be faster than system memory if we can run it at higher frequency.
TurboCache allows to bring better performance at lower price. One way to do it is to reduce the cost of memory and thus increase the investment into the processor.
I believe that you might have already heard about ATI Hyper Memory technology. So did NVIDIA. According to them, the story behind this technology is the following. Architecting a GPU in hardware is not a trivial. During the development of this solution some info leaked and ATI somehow managed to learn quite a lot about it. At first they started saying bad things about NVIDIA’s TurboCache technology, so that the customers got somewhat concerned about its success. And then all of a sudden Hyper Memory was announced. They didn’t make and hardware modifications on the chips. All the data are read only in the local memory, which everyone have been doing since the AGP interface came on stage. There was no rendering into the system memory, which means that this technology couldn’t work in a class of applications. NVIDIA didn’t respond by an immediate announcement of the technology, because they claim they wanted to have a product ready first. Again, I would like to stress that this is NVIDIA’s story. It is up to you to believe it or not. As for our opinion about the Hyper Memory and TurboCache efficiency, we would retain our verdict until the official release of the graphics cards supporting TurboCache, when we will be able to offer you a bit more than just speculation. So, be patient :)
On the mobile side TurboCache will also be a highly efficient. Mobile solutions are small, so fewer physical memory chips onboard make a lot of sense. The second advantage, is that DRAM takes power, so if we have less DRAM, we will require less power and hence get more battery life. So, TurboCache is a double win on the mobile side.
As you can see, these boards are equipped with a passive heatsink, may have 1 or 2 pieces of memory onboard, will be designed for PCI Express x16 interface. NVIDIA’s partners should start shipping their solutions based on GeForce 6200 with TurboCache technology around late January ?early February 2005. The cards will be priced from $79-$129 depending on the specification. However, the first samples should start appearing next week already.
Since we mentioned the price a good question arises: how many customers considering a purchase of a $100 card actually have the required 512MB of system memory in their system, which is supposed to be a minimum requirement for the PCI Express system? In fact NVIDIA didn’t give a definite answer to that. They only claimed that their TurboCache technology also works in systems with smaller amount of system memory, which however will imply that we will dynamically allocate less system memory for the graphics needs.
In conclusion about the desktop solutions I would like to add that NVIDIA also announced that they would start shipping GeForce 6600 for AGP interface in February. This way they will have a complete product line-up for both: PCI Express and AGP interfaces.
