TurboCache and Hypermemory are utter scams

I don't get why ATI and nVidia resort to essentially misleading potential buyers about the amount of dedicated video memory that their cards come with. While I understand that most people on NBR and the experienced users see right through this little sham, I can't help but think that the average Joe is being mislead.

 

ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Coke, Pepsi...welcome to the world.

 

Nvidia's Turbocache is considerably better than ATI's Hypermemory; it can actually make up for lack of dedicated memory pretty well. A 64MB + 64MB Go7400 is about the same speed as a 128MB Go7400.

That said, TC/HM really are for marketing, making cards seem like they have more than they really do. Most people probably won't know the difference and then be disappointed.

Chaz

 

What makes Nvidia's solution better? Is it more efficient? Faster?

 

The sky is falling!!!


LOL no disrespect but what do we expect? Someday Coke will stop using sugar harvested by slaves. Wal-Mart will pay more than $8.00 an hour. And Nvidia and Ati will stop advertising "hypermemory." - fat chance.

 

Haha, I guess I'll have to launch a boycott of all ATI and nVidia products. Now who's up for trading in their 7900GTX for a nice S3 Chrome card in the spirit of protest?

 

That said, ChazMan, I would also be interested in knowing why nVidia's turbocache is better than Hypermemory?

 

yeah that's an intersting argument about the turbocache from Nvidia. Do You know from fact and were?

 

Bump..in case Chaz didn't see. I'm still curious what Nvidia does to make their memory sharing solution better.

 

Here you go:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2413

 

But in that same thread, they say "the separation of up and down stream bandwidth in PCI Express makes this relatively painless". Wouldn't that indicate that it's not a big difference in performance?

 

That means it is not a hard thing to do for the system because the PCI Express x16 link has a lot of bandwidth. Doing HM on an AGP 8X bus would be near impossible - limited bandwidth, but also the fact that data can only travel one way at a time.

 

Thanks for the link, ChazMan

 

Seeing that the highest card on those charts was a Geforce Go 6200 TC, im sure the Geforce Go 7400 TC in my new (not here yet) XPS M1210 will perform far better that those. I guess it wont be too bad of a card for games.

 

The Go7400 isn't a bad card at all, and the fact that it was only a 64MB dedicated + 64 shared didn't seem to hurt it in the benchmarks. Those are benchmarks though, gaming is the real test.
Either way, the Go7400 is a good mid-range card, games should look pretty good on it.

 

agreed!!
you can Overclock it to get up to 2200 3dmark05 score!!! thats close to my 6600 !

 

To me it seems a little drastic to make such an old article set the standard for what is better or not. I would believe that ATI would have make some changes to the drivers since that article was made. So I second that the article is correct. But I agree that the Nvidia tech seems better, but the performance drop I can only guess about

 

Thanks Chaz. Interesting stuff.