NVIDIA have a rather good array of products on the market at the moment, from top of the range 6800s to budget 6200. All bring support for the latest graphics technology, but each have their own benefits. Today Ryszard takes a look at a new technology called TurboCache, which is being used on some new 6200 models.
NV44's memory subsystem, especially the memory controller and new peripheral memory management unit (MMU) is a new departure for NVIDIA. Under the TurboCache marketing umbrella, the memory subsystem uses PCI Express to allow read and write of local system memory by the GPU. It's not quite AGP, since AGP could never texture back into memory, only read from AGP locked memory to the GPU or dump the entire framebuffer back on the host, whereas using PCI Express, NV44 can use local memory as a fully read/write data store for a number of data objects it routinely works with.
With benchmarks of a "classic" 6200 and two turbo cache variants, you'll want to be reading this review. Find it here.