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 m ...

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. Mode ...

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 remember ...

by using both onboard video memory and main system memory. Main memory is accessed using the high-bandwidth PCI-Express 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 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 The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

, 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 release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

users or a configuration file modification for X.Org Server 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