im an ATI fanboi but good job nvidia!..your products keep on getting better and better!(though i dont plan on downgrading to any of these from my 9800pro...its still a great budget card). nvidia has certainly won in this generation of graphic card wars...lets see whats going to happen when the next gen line up comes out(though i doubt that'll be anytime soon).

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"The next thing that we're waiting to see is a working implementation of virtual memory for the graphics subsystem. The entire graphics industry has been chomping at the bit for that one for years now."

3DLabs VP10 GPU has a feature that allows system memory to be treated as virtual memory for the GPU, and it has been out 12 months or more.

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any chance we can see numbers for this thing on an intel system with higher bandwidth DDR2 memory? Maybe even overclocked DDR2?

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Turbo cache and Hyper memory cards should do better on Intel based systems as they do not need to go via the HTT to det to the memory. So I agree with #3 show us som i925X(E) tests. I'm not expecting higher scores on the Intel systems however. Just a larger gain from this type of technology.

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Actually, nForce 4 + AMD systems are looking better than Intel non-925xe based systems for TurboCache parts. We haven't looked at the 925xe yet though ... that could be interesting. But overhead hurts utilization alot on a serial bus, and having more than 6.4GB/s from memory might not be that useful.

The efficiency of getting bandwidth across the PCI Express bus will still be the main bottleneck in systems though. Chipsets need to impliment PCI Express properly and well. That's really the important part. The 915 chipset is an example of what not to do.

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Great review.

Wow, almost 50 fps on HL2 at 10x7, that is pretty good for a budget card.

I'd like to see MS, ATI, and Nvidia get more people into PC gaming, that would make for better and cheaper games for those of us who are already loving it.

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I may be way off base with this question, but would this sort of GPU lend it self well to some sort of integrated, onboard graphics solution? Even if it is isn't integrated directly into the main chipset (or chip for Nvidia), could it simply be soldered to the motherboard somewhere?

Somehow this seems to make more sense to me for what to do with this technology than use it on a dedicated video card, especially if the price point is not that much less than a regular 6200.

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nVidia's marketing department must be really pleased with coming up with the name "TurboCache". It makes it sounds like its faster than a normal card without TurboCache, whereas in reality the opposite is true. Uninformed customers would probably choose a TurboCache version over a normal version, even if they were priced the same!
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Derek- does the 16MB 6200 have limitations on what resolutions can be used in games? I know you wouldn't want to run it at 1600x1200x32 in Far Cry for instance, but in older games like Quake 3 it should be fast enough.

Thing is that the frame-buffer at 1600x1200x32 requires 7.3MB, so with double-buffering you're using up a total of 14.65MB leaving just 1.35MB for the Z-buffer and anything else it needs to keep in local memory, which might not be enough. I'm assuming the frame the card is currently displaying must be held in local memory, as well as the frame being worked on.

The situation is even worse with anti-aliasing as the frame-buffer size of the frame being worked on is multiplied in size by the level of AA. At 1280x960x32 with 4xAA, the single frame-buffer alone is 18.75MB meaning it won't fit in the 16MB 6200. It might not even manage 1024x768 with 4xAA as the two frame buffers would total 15MB (12MB for the one being worked on, 3MB for the one being displayed).

It will be interesting to know what the resolution limits for the 16MB (and 32MB) cards are, with and without anti-aliasing.

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IMO, even (as low as) $79 is too expensive. Taking 128MB of system memory away on a system budgetized to include one of these, would typically be leaving 384MB, robbing the system of memory to pay nVidia et al. for a part without (much) memory.

I tend to disagree with the slant of the article too, that it's not necessarily a good thing to try pushing modern gaming eyecandy at expense of performance. What looks good isn't a crisp and anti-aliased slideshow, but a playable game. even someone just beginning at gaming can discern a lag when fragging it out.

We're only looking at current games now, the bar for performance needs will be raised but the cards are memory bandwidth limited due to the architecture. These might look like a good alternative for someone who went and paid $90 for an FX5200 from BestBuy last year but in a budget system it's going to be tough to justify ~ $80-100 when a few bucks more won't rob one of system memory or as much performance.

Even so, historically we've seen that initial price-points do fall, better to see modern support than a rehash of a FX5xxx.

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#7, I was thinking the same thing. This concept seems absolutely perfect for nForce5 IGP, should NVidia decide to go that route. And, once again, NVidia's approach to budget seems superior to ATI's, at least from an initial glance. A heavily-castrated 6200TC running off SHARED RAM STILL manages to outperform a full X300? Come on, ATI, get with it!
I gotta wonder, though: this solution seems unbelievably dependent on "proper implementation of the PCIe architecture." This means that the card can never be coupled with HSI for older systems, and transitional boards will have trouble running the card (Gigabyte's PT880 with converted PEG, for example- PT880 natively supports AGP). Does this mean that a budget card on a budget motherboard will suffer significantly?

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