NVIDIA GeForce 7000M TurboCache supporting 752MB

Can anyone tell me, the totally ungeeky person, if this:

NVIDIA GeForce 7000M TurboCache supporting 752MB

Falls under SL requirements for playing, which say this:

7000 Series:

* 7600, 7800, 7900

8000 Series:

* 8500, 8600, 8800

GeForce Go Series:

* 7600, 7800, 7900


Is the 7000M an "umbrella" type thing or something? I am going to buy a new laptop but want to make sure I get the right thing. I'm sorry for not knowing. I have been looking at laptops all morning for the correct requirements and have fast become overwhelmed and frustrated.

Thanks


Betty Whitman

Avoid "TurboCache" , it dynamically allocates memory from main memory to maximize performance.

It borrows system ram cause it barly has any (usually 16~64mb) wich can crash you running heavy apps and is much slower then dedicated ram on vid.card.

and 7000 is a horrible card ~.~, look for least 128~256mb dedicated video ram on a laptop, none of these borrow ram from system to use along side video card, theyre horrible.

I think the issue is that most laptops don't come with these higher end graphics cards. I can't find any laptop that comes with higher than the GeForce 8400.

In my opinion, laptops were never meant to use heavy graphics programs and games to begin with. Their whole design was meant for the business end of computing so that is still the main focus of any laptop manufacturer. Recently, the trend has been to attract more than just the business people to the market so they are putting a little higher end graphics and audio hardware devices in them..........college students, I believe, are the intial target audience. The problem arises with the very limited space to put all this performance related stuff in and the dealing with the potential heat generated with all this high end stuff........they are inherently handicapped right off the bat. You are going to have compromise on what you will get in your laptop vs a desktop...........the performance will always be less with the laptop. The problems encountered will always be higher.

Someday laptops might catch up.........but, as of now, they are far behind. You can get close if you are willing to shell out a substaintial sum of dollars. A $500 USD laptop will likely not work satisfactorily where a desktop in that price range will. It's your choice.

Thats unfortunate, I thought lap tops and desktops were equal nowadays. I see I was wrong. I have a desktop now, but I use it for work and wanted the capability of having a lap top to move around the house with and also use it to run SL. This will present a challenge.

Laptops lag behind desktops, but not by a huge margin. With a laptop power and thermal constraints prevent you from putting in the latest and greatest processors and GPU's. But you can still get laptops with some pretty powerful stuff in them.

The nVidia 8600M, for example, is pretty powerful.

OP: Yes, it will work (but the performance won't be there), but why would you buy a laptop with such an outdated GPU?

And you know I've been searching and searching for a laptop that comes with the 8600 and I only find the ones that come with the 8400 or lower. Maybe because the budget I am looking for doesn't have them. I will search ebay. I'd be willing to get a used laptop as long as it runs well and has the proper graphics card to run SL. I am not always on SL like some people, but I figure if my graphics card can't handle SL then it will have issues handling much anything else 3D.

That's probably not true. I know of no other 3D program that is as intensive as SL.

But, a laptop less than about $800 is going to be iffy with SL. It may be able to run it but it will tend to have problems that you would not have with a desktop that costs less.

Beware of used computers........you very well could be buying someone else's headaches.

Will do Peggy, I know it can be risky getting a used computer. I may just settle for a laptop with the 8400 GeForce and deal with the lag and the crashes here and there.

Well, I found this new company online, I am waiting for my laptop to get here, should be monday. Ibuypower has laptops with the Nvidia cards in them. It will show you a basic laptop but you can change just about everything. The don't build it until you order it and they build especially for gaming. Now, let's see if they work. Cross your fingers. www.ibuypower.com Laptops and PCs

Betty

This one, at Ibuypower has a NVidia GeForce 8800 in it.

http://www.ibuypower.com/ibp/store/configurator.aspx?mid=294

The higher the number the newer it is. I also checked to make sure cuz somewhere on these threads someone posted that lower numbers are new, not true. I was struck by that statement because while I do not know very much about hardware components, the one thing I do know is smaller numbers are older. The same goes for software, like sl, each time they release a new version the number goes higher.

So maybe there is one for you here Isabella.

Betty

Well, the GPU won't cause crashes (that'll happen regardless), but performance should be fairly decent with an 8400. Not stupendous, but decent.

Higher numbers aren't newer so much as they're better. An 8800 will perform better than an 8600 which will perform better than an 8400, etc. It's a performance rating system, not a versioning system (although in a way it's a versioning system, as the 9 series is newer than the 8 series which is newer than the 7 series...so technically the first number is the version, and the numbers and letters after are the performance rating).

To top it off, the number alone isn't the whole story. You get a suffix after the number which means quite a bit (GT, GTS, GTX, M, etc).

That said, nVidia shook it up a bit with their new GPU's (the GTX 200, for instance).

I know a lot of people run the 8400M in SL with fairly satisfactory perfomance. The computer also needs a strong CPU and plenty of system RAM............it really needs it all to run SL with reasonable quality. But, the real problem I hear from laptop users is not how SL runs (they can pretty much get it set up to run nicely for them) but the excessive heat generated while running the game. As I stated earlier, laptops are a little problematic with heat. Excessive heat causes problems.........up to and including damage of hardware components inside the computer. A program like SL with all the intensive, heavy processing (both CPU and GPU) heats the hardware up tremendously....much more than most think.

Get a "cool pad". Never play SL with the laptop actually on your lap. Never play SL with the laptop sitting on the couch or bed next to you. You absolutely have to keep those ventilation holes on the bottom of the laptop clear of obstructions. There is so little space compared to a desktop inside the case that even restrcting a tiny part of the ventilation system is dangerous for you computer. Also dust builds up inside a laptop just like ti does in a desktop.......and that dust will, eventually, build to a point that so much heat is trapped next to the hardware that a failure is almost guaranteed. Laptop computers are much harder to clean out than desktops.......due to their design.

You will find most newer graphics cards are upgraded versions of their predecessors by increasing DirectX 10 drivers/functions, which are useless to SL, as it is a OpenGL platform.

The 7000M, note the M, as this signifies a 'Mobile' chip welded to the MB for laptops and some desktops as well, has very little of its own memory (probably around 64k) and uses its 'turbo cache' label to simply snatch a lump of slower system memory. Add memory leaks to the SL Client, and you will crash more often.

You can certainly run SL on a 7600 or 7900 series cards, but go for a GT-GTX version. The 8600-8800 variations will also run well, as long as you go for the GT-GTX versions. Core memory, bus and CPU ratings are relevant, which is usually signified by the second/third numbers of the model within a series. The higher the second and third numbers, the higher the specs of the card, broadly speaking.

Different graphics card lines use different graphics processors. DirectX is the most commonly used graphics programming API, but that doesn't mean that there are no changes in OpenGL processing between GPU's. Just like DirectX, there are different OpenGL versions, which need hardware support.

TurboCache varients tend to have between a 32MB and 128MB built in frame buffer (more commonly, especially with the 7 series, a 32MB to 64MB frame buffer).

SL won't crash more often, because TurboCache does not decrease the pageable amount of memory that SL can address. It can address 2GB of address space regardless of the GPU used.

When evaluating a GC for SL, look at the OpenGL version it supports. The current version is 2.1 The general forecast for OpenGL is that it is unlikely to have many more versions as DirectX seems to be the most popular platform for gaming.


nVidia cards with the M suffix have a very small on board dedicated memory. Actually finding that value is usually buried deep in the specifications. Using system memory, apart from being slower than dedicated DDR3, will grab more memory that SL soaks up.

Bearing in mind, even having an OS that can access 4gb, has a limited timespan before a system crash due to memory leaks of the SL Client, if you reduce that by allocating system memory to graphics, you are reducing the playable time. Also consider that by sharing system memory with the Graphics, which is perhaps the most intensive element of the SL Platform, you are also sharing the memory bus resources.

Yes, but there are already a handful out there in currently widespread GPU's. 1.4, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.1 support are common in current hardware. The GeForce 7 series supports OpenGL 2.0.

Ah, technically no, because you are not limited to the amount of physical RAM that the computer contains. The operating system can also address a page file, as can processes. So let's say that you have 1GB system RAM. SL can, as a 32 bit process, address up to 2GB of memory. Since you only have 1GB of system RAM, it can, at an absolute theoretical maximum, have 1GB of code and textures in physican RAM, and 1GB of code and textures in the page file. Factor in realistic things such as the operating system and some memory allocated to the GPU, and the usable memory drops to maybe 600MB.

SL won't crash, it'll just operate slower because its paging a lot. It'll still address 2GB of address space.

I can see a pattern here.....

Although the OS can address more than physical ram available by using page files, that fundementally is the issue with the way the SL Clients 'memory leaks' cause so many issues. By removing chunks of memory into a mapped page file to create more physical ram space, it in itself causes problems when it overlays ram maps into areas already asigned. When it tries to reload them, it comes into conflict. Registers become corrupt and that memory map is effectly lost, creating a cascading effect.

I used to progamme in 128kb of ram, using the pysical ram of 64kb and 64kb of 'shadow ram' through a memory hole. The problems arise when you swap in and out or fetch chunks that are dynamic and can grow with computations. The same principals apply here.

To understand this visually....

You have a parcel of land, you build in 3d upwards from the base build, but none of the builds are touching. The only way to see the whole build is from below and or above. You are convinced that your builds fill all the gaps within the total footprint of the parcel, then attempt to lower all the builds to ground level and forgot that you added a window cill which now colides with the adjacent build. In memory terms, this then corrupts the collision build and makes it in accessable. The more elements that collide, cause a cascade effect crashing the build. Thats a very simplistic way of visualising how paged memory can fail. Remember Tetris?

Now you add the OS, which does the very same. Most services are dormant awaiting a api call from programmes, they are called and try to load, more overwritten registers, more overlaps and to some extent, Vista, which is perhaps the most stable version of Windows, forcibly takes back those registers (when it doesn't, you get a blue screen crash), carries out the tasks, and then hands back that physical memory, the programme (in this case SL) finds a mess it cannot deal with, so freezes and or crashes. Then you want to add Graphics memory loading to this mess?

This is no longer possible in semi-modern operating systems. What you described could be possible in MS-DOS, and possibly Windows 9x (although Windows 9x featured memory protection, so it's unlikely, but you get the benefit of the doubt).

Windows NT (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista are required for SL, and all are based on Windows NT), Mac OS X, and Linux all feature memory protection that prevent what you described. Their memory managers do not allow this to happen under any circumstances. Indeed, what you described was why Windows 9x (and the classic MacOS) would become unstable upon an application crash.

Rather, what happens with SL is that for many people (not all, but many), the client constantly allocates RAM, but does not release it. When the client reaches the 32 bit process memory barrier, it is unable to allocate any more RAM, and crashes.

I respect your programming experience, but operating systems are vastly different now, and memory management isn't even remotely the same anymore.

SL is not /LARGEADDRESSAWARE wish it was, no reason not to enable that flag.

I understand where you are coming from, but....

People experience system lockups and even BSOD, which signifies exactly what I described. The OS is unable to cope with badly behaved programmes, even with protected memory address registers. BSOD is the worst behaved, system lock up are sencondary in most circumstances, but from your angle and explaination, that should never happen.

Despite 'modern' thinking about the death of MSDOS, Windows still uses many of the old Int fucntions. You only have to look at the recources of any driver, it quotes Int allocation. Windows, even the latest incarnations will always have to use this level of programming, and is still only considered a shell layer. The biggest jump forward perceived by the introduction of Windows, since 95, is the superior allocation of memory and the reduction of BSOD. It is not a perfect technology, as BSOD are still possible, and is still part of the bugs in the SL client, but renamed 'memory leaking'.

In summary, we are both right.

so if im running a lap top all i have to look for is the M on the end of like Nvidia 8800M.

and another thing when i look at the specs of my laptop it says it has three cards

radeon x2500

radeon HD 2600

nvidia geforce 8400M GS/9300M

i dont know any thing about computers i just want SL to work on my laptop

Nothing like replying to yourself. I have my new laptop from ibuypower.com. It is doing fine and according to the Windows Vista (which I had not used before but really, really dislike so far, it is running at a 4.5 base score. (Based on lowest subscore). Below is the output, which I don't know if it will be useful or not, but hopefully it is:

Processor: Calculations per second 4.8

Memory (RAM): Memory operations per second 4.5 (My fault I think, meant to request 4 gigs of ram when I ordered and only ordered 2 by mistake)

Graphics: Desktop performance for Windows Aero (what the heck is that??) 4.7

Gaming Graphics: 3D business and gaming graphics performance: 5.3

Primary Hard Disk: Disk data transfer rate: 4.9

"A computer with a base score of 4 or 5 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3‑D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released."

The figures above are a result of a Performance information test thingy. "Windows Experience Index Base Score.

I did have a couple of problems after about a week....I had to download some new drivers for the Nvidia card and I also had to turn sleep off. Stupid sleep was set on five minutes and every time I turned around it shut down on me.

So I am very happy with the laptop, so far, that I bought from ibuypower.com. It runs smoothly and quickly altho I do want to add more ram. I had no idea the water sparkled in SL, that was a neat surprise after my old laptop. Like getting new glasses. LOL

Here is a link to the one I purchased, the lowest priced one they have available, least as far as I know.

http://www.ibuypower.com/ibp/store/configurator.aspx?mid=295

Maybe someone else will be happy with it too. Have a good one.

IMHO.....Windows is just dos with fancy graphics. Old DOS dog here...for years after I finally broke down and bought windows I still went into dos to do most of my stuff. I only bought it (Windows) in order to go on aol many years ago and chat with my sis who was overseas at the time. I kinda miss DOS.....