Memory Subsystem, Caches and Other Improvements

As we have already said G200 has more RBE units and since each of them is connected with a 64-bit memory controller, the number of memory controllers has also been increased from 4 to 8. This also required a wider memory bus: 512bit instead of 256bit. The amount of memory has also increased. The top model of the family comes equipped with 1024MB of local graphics memory by default. This is where it has an advantage over competitors that are equipped with 512MB of memory by default, which may turn into a serious issue in high resolutions.

Since they introduced 512bit memory bus, they decided not to offer support for any new GDDR types. So, G200, like previous Nvidia chips supports only widely spread GDDR3. Today these chips can work at frequencies up to 1200 (2400) MHz and together with a 512bit bus it gives us a good reason to believe that G200 will not lack any memory subsystem bandwidth.

As for the other innovations, there is not much info about them available, but we know that G200 has got larger caches and more registers. They have optimized the internal interfaces between the functional GPU units and the thread dispatch processor logic. As a result, the computational capacities of the new GPU idle much less.

All this gives us hope that the new graphics solution generation will perform every well in real conditions, but as we have already mentioned, we are going to talk about Nvidia G20 gaming performance in our next article.