Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

's TurboCache technology is a method of allowing

video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

s more available

framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern ...

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

by using both onboard video memory and main system memory. Main memory is accessed using the high-bandwidth

PCI-Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common mot ...

bus. TurboCache was developed as a means to provide a better cost/performance ratio by reducing the amount of memory modules on the video card. According to Nvidia, a GeForce 6200 with TurboCache will perform about four times better than the Intel GMA 900. As with integrated graphics, the operating system may report a lower amount of main memory than is physically present when main memory is used. When TurboCache was introduced on the

GeForce 6200 The GeForce 6 series (codename NV40) is Nvidia's sixth generation of GeForce graphic processing units. Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced PureVideo post-processing for video, '' SLI'' technology, and ''Shader Model 3.0 ...

with TurboCache, there was confusion over how much local memory a buyer could expect from the TurboCache enabled video card. This figure could lie between 16-128 MiB, with Nvidia listing only total memory from both video memory and main memory. Eventually, NVIDIA included only video memory sizes on marketing and packaging. While TC can improve 3D quality in games using a great deal of video memory for texture rendering, performance of games utilizing a large percent of system RAM (such as EA Games' Battlefield series and their mods that typically consume 512 MB-1 GB RAM) can suffer dramatically on systems with 1 GB RAM or below. Some users of such setups have attempted to disable TC. Such an option is not supported by NVIDIA's official drivers but can be accomplished using a registry modification for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

users or a configuration file modification for

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...

users. A video card with TurboCache typically is slower in 3D benchmarks than a similar video card which has its own discrete video memory.

External links

Official websiteGeForce 6200 TurboCache: PCI Express Made Useful
{{NVIDIA Nvidia

See also

External links