HyperMemory and TurboCache - useless, harmful?

[thewhat]

I'm buying a Radeon 5450, for regular 2D desktop use, audio editing and HD video playback.

I see some (most) come with the HyperMemory feature, which - from what I can tell - uses the system RAM when needed.

I can't really see any possible benefits of this function and I'd like to keep my measly 2GB of system RAM intact. In fact, I can only imagine such a function would have a negative impact on the performance, although it might not be obviously noticeable.

I can imagine it being useful for an old video card with 64MB of RAM, but I think 512MB is by itself more than enough for such a low end card like the 5450.


What can you tell me about this? Any benchmarks that would confirm or deny my suspicions?

 

[formulav8]

I remember when Turbocache and Hypermemory came out a few years ago anandtech did a review of those features. I'm sure the features are more optimized now days.

Basically it uses system memory on a temporary basis and not on a full allocation basis as a permanent frame buffer. So it will aquire/release memory resources as needed. You can use a smaller integrated frame buffer and utilitize system ram if the textures are larger.

IIRC in their tests there was up to an 8% increase in performance while 2%-4% averages. But since it was so long ago I could be off on my numbers.


Jason