The performance and capabilities of PC graphics cards are growing at an exponential rate. Models with the best characteristics, over time, become cheaper and give priority to new products. Nevertheless, such a continuous increase in power entails additional advantages. After several months or even years, the technology used in the once flagship GPUs is utilized in a truncated form in products with the same set of features at a much more affordable price. And often, other innovations that debut throughout the product’s life cycle give it new opportunities.
In the case of the NVIDIA GeForce 6200, the PCI Express interface was such a breakthrough, which made it possible to match the best models, requiring only 16 MB of memory. This was made possible because TurboCache technology made it possible to process images directly in the system RAM, eliminating the need to have a local storage of large amounts of data on the card itself. This model belongs to the basic level and was aimed at users who wanted to improve their integrated graphics.
GeForce 6200 Features
This article discusses two modifications of the video card. One of them is equipped with one discrete 16-MB Samsung memory chip, and the other with two such chips with a total volume of 32 MB. Apart from this one difference, both cards are physically identical.
The 6200th model uses a PCI Express slot designed for energy efficiency and low cost.
A printed circuit board does not differ in a large number of components. The graphics processor is made using 0.11-micron technology, and requires passive cooling, operating at a base frequency of 350 MHz. Local memory is synchronized at the same frequency of 350 MHz (700 MHz DDR). At these speeds, both GeForce 6200 cards theoretically reach a peak speed of 1.4 Gb / s, but in this case everything is different.
Throughput
The GeForce 6200 TurboCache with one memory chip is limited to a 32-bit bus. Thus, at a frequency of 350 MHz, a 16 MB card has a throughput of 2.8 GB / s. However, the 32-megabyte modification, equipped with two microcircuits, has a 64-bit memory bus and a total data transfer rate of 5.6 GB / s. But since the nature of TurboCache technology allows these cards to directly access the system’s RAM, they can also take full advantage of the 8 GB / s bandwidth offered by the PCI Express X16 graphics slot.
With this feature, NVIDIA promoted the GeForce 6200 16-TC / 128MB as a model with a peak transfer rate of 10.8 GB / s, and 32-TC / 128MB - 13.6 GB / s. This is important to note because it is very difficult to distinguish between video cards. When installed on a system with 512 MB of RAM (minimum requirement), the 6200th model supports up to 128 MB of frame buffer.
Thus, cards are marked as supporting 128 MB, regardless of how much local memory is installed. However, they are notable for the overall peak throughput offered by the various configurations.
Turbo cache
One of the main reasons why NVIDIA has released a card with TurboCache technology is to offer the feature set of the flagship GeForce 6800 Ultra model at a much more affordable price.
The only thing that is not supported is the scalable SLI communication interface. This is NVIDIA’s proprietary technology used to combine several PCI Express graphics cards, which allows them to share the computing load and dramatically increase performance. SLI is reserved only for high-end gaming cards . However, in addition to the communication interface, the GeForce 6200 has the same capabilities as its older brothers. NVIDIA, on the example of the GeForce 4 MX, came to the conclusion that it makes no sense to produce an entry-level video card that does not have the functions of more expensive models of the same generation. Therefore, the FX 5200 appeared, and now the 6200.
Benefits of TurboCache
This technology eliminated the need for large amounts of local memory to store rendering data, such as buffers for invisible surfaces, depths or patterns, textures and other graphic data. So NVIDIA reduced the overall cost of the board due to the reduction in the number of discrete memory chips. Although this sounds like a flaw, but due to the relatively large bandwidth of PCI Express X16, performance has not decreased much.
TurboCache also eliminates the bottleneck associated with other graphics solutions, such as the Intel i915G. Most integrated GPUs are completely dependent on system memory. This means that they usually require more system memory than the GeForce 6200, which leads to reduced system performance. The presence of local memory and intelligent control of the use of the system prevents this.
Architecture changes
To implement TurboCache technology, NVIDIA modified the pipeline to include the new MMU memory management module, which makes it easy to process data in system RAM, as well as efficiently read and write. In addition, the architecture has undergone changes for several elements of the pipeline to cope with the increased delay that occurs when accessing system memory via the PCI Express interface. Thus, the graphics processor is a 4-pixel pipeline with 3 vertex shaders.
Forceware Driver
However, the hardware was not the only thing that had to be modified to enable TurboCache. Forceware drivers have also been modified so that they can determine where color, texture, and z-buffer data are located. This new built-in feature has helped increase the performance of all applications. TurboCache Manager allows you to allocate additional space for graphics based on the needs of a particular program. And then, as soon as the application is closed, the memory allocated for image processing is freed up and becomes available for the system. This entire process is performed behind the scenes and is transparent to the end user. As you can see, the driver reports that the video card has 128 MB of available memory, although only 16 or 32 MB is installed locally.
Although officially GeForce 6200 Windows 7 does not support, installing the appropriate driver, the card works without problems.
Test results
None of the GeForce 6200 variants was able to show high results in any of the performance tests, but these cards were not created for this. They brought true DX9 class features with PS 3.0 support to affordable products. However, performance is worth mentioning, given that tangible performance is provided with activated full-screen anti-aliasing.
Advantages and disadvantages
According to the manufacturer, the 6200 with TurboCache was developed for the mass user, so some architecture design changes, such as color support and z-compression, were adopted. This is not a technology limitation, but a conscious design decision, since most users played at medium resolution with little or no filtering. In addition, there was an error in the ForceWare driver that affected the performance of full-screen anti-aliasing.
The NVIDIA GeForce 6200 graphics card has excelled in several areas. Firstly, it provided support for the same feature set as the flagship 6800 Ultra, at a very affordable price. Technically speaking, in this regard, the 6200th model even surpassed it, because it had an updated video engine and TurboCache technology. And due to the fact that the functionality of the GeForce 6 Series is practically present in every price category, NVIDIA gave developers more incentive to create games using DX9 (for example, Pixel Shader 3.0).
Finally
The NVIDIA GeForce 6200 features an energy-efficient design that surpasses the capabilities of almost all integrated GPUs. Users who want to move to a higher level without spending a fortune could find the desired one in the 6200th model, especially if their main interest was digital video. Even though the performance in games of serious gamers was not impressive, the card could run even the most demanding games of that time and correctly process scenes. For example, with low settings for detail and resolution, the GeForce 6200 allowed you to play Doom 3 or Half Life 2.