TurboCache Explained:

The NVIDIA® TurboCache™ technology is a patented hardware and software solution that enables direct rendering to system memory. Through this innovative architecture, NVIDIA can deliver its award-winning NVIDIA GeForce™ 6 Series graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture—including Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and the NVIDIA PureVideo™ technology—to mainstream desktop PCs and notebooks.

Table 1

The Memory Management Unit (MMU) allows the GPU to seamlessly allocate and de-allocate surfaces in system memory, as well as read and write to that memory efficiently and effectively.

The TurboCache Manager (TCM) lets additional memory be allocated for graphics usage based on application need. Once the application is closed, the memory that was allocated for graphics usage is then released and made available for system use.

Table 2

When memory is shared by both graphics and other system applications, memory bandwidth is important in delivering a quality user experience. By leveraging the bidirectional bandwidth of PCI Express of up to 8 GBps, TurboCache has an effective bandwidth of over 10 GBps (Table 2). This is a 50 percent increase in bandwidth over a non-TurboCache GPU, which cannot render directly to system memory.

Through its unique ability to render directly to system memory, the GeForce 6200 GPU with TurboCache fundamentally redefines the price/performance and power/performance of mainstream discrete GPU solutions. With minimal local graphics memory requirements, the GeForce 6200 with TurboCache delivers graphics and system performance exceeding that of non-TurboCache 128 MB graphics solutions.