NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 & 6600 non-GT: Affordable Gaming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 11, 2004 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half Life 2 (Source) Visual Stress Test
Although it's around a year since we thought that the game would be out, all of the preloads off Steam and magazine reviews seem to indicate that Half Life 2 is finally coming. The closest thing that we have to being able to benchmark the actual game is the Visual Stress Test supplied with Counter Strike: Source.First, let's start off with seeing how the performance stacks up at 800x600. Here, ATI clearly takes the lead, which is what we would expect, given the X700's clock speed advantages over the 6600. The 6600 puts forth a decent effort, securing a hold on the 2nd place position, but what's truly interesting is the X600 Pro in third. Outperforming the GeForce 6200 by almost 20%, the X600 Pro looks like it will be the faster card under Half Life 2, if these scores are indicative of anything.
The Visual Stress Test would not run at 640x480. Thus, our resolution scaling comparison begins at 800x600. We see that all of the cards, once again, exhibit steep slopes when it comes to resolution scaling in Half Life 2. We're once again not CPU bound here, just limited by the GPUs.
Notes from the Lab
ATI X300SE: The X300SE did an OK job at 800x600, but once the resolution started to go up, we saw some choppiness in the test. Again, since this isn't a gaming scenario, it's tough to tell what actual gameplay would be like with the X300SE.ATI X600 Pro: If you don't restart the game between resolution changes, there appears to be a texture corruption issue, causing some textures to appear pink. The same issue occurs on NVIDIA cards, but it just seems to happen less frequently on ATI cards. The test is beta, so we're not too surprised and it doesn't seem to impact performance. The performance of the X600 is pretty solid, clearly faster than the 6200, but a bit slower than the 6600.
ATI X700: A clear performance leader here, no issues with running at even the highest resolutions. At 1280x1024, it did get a little sluggish in places during the test, but 1024x768 ran very smoothly.
GeForce 6200: Water reflections really look a lot better at 10x7, the aliasing is pretty horrible at 640x480. Performance was decent, but clearly not great.
GeForce 6600: It's good to note that both the 6 series cards are fully DX9 compliant under HL2. The 6600 seemed to offer similar performance to the X700, but it was slower by a noticeable margin.
Intel Integrated Graphics: When benchmarkng the VST, there were two cards that didn't appear in Valve's database - the GeForce 6200, because it hadn't been released yet, and Intel's integrated graphics. I guess that it's no surprise why no one uses the integrated graphics for gaming. The integrated graphics only runs in DX8.1 mode under CS: Source. The display driver crashed running this benchmark as well. It's becoming quite easy to benchmark Intel graphics - we get to skip half the benchmarks.
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PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
I'm assuming the 6200 you tested was a 128-bit version? You don't seem to mention it at all in the review, but I doubt nVidia would send you a 64-bit model unless they wanted to do badly in the benchmarks :)I don't think the X700 has appeared on an AT review before, only the X700 XT. Did you underclock your XT, or have you got hold of a standard X700? I trust those X700 results aren't from the X700 XT at full speed! :)
As #11 and #12 mentioned, with the exception of Doom 3, the X600 Pro is faster than the 6200:
Doom 3 - 39.3 60.1 (-35%)
HL2 Stress Test - 91 76 (+20%)
SW Battlefront - 45 33 (+36%)
Sims 2 - 33.9 32.2 (+5%)
UT2004 (1024x768) - 46.3 37 (+25%) [they were CPU limited at lower resolutions]
BF Vietnam - 81 77 (+5%)
Halo - 45.2 44 (+3%)
Far Cry - 74.7 60.6 (+23%)
So the X600 Pro is slower than the 6200 (128-bit) in Doom 3 by a significant amount, but its marginally faster than it in three games, and its significantly faster than the 6200 in the other three games and also the HL2 Stress Test. So that makes the X600 Pro the better card.
The X700 absolutely thrashed even the 6600, let alone the 6200, in every game except of course Doom 3 where the 6600 was faster, and Halo where the X700 was a bit faster than the 6600 but not by such a large amount.
Given the prices of the ATI cards, X300SE ($75), X300 ($100), X600 Pro ($130), X700 (MSRP $149); the 6600 is going to have to be priced at under its MSRP of $149 because of the far superior X700 at the same price point. Lets say a maximum of $130 for the 6600.
If thats the case, I can't see how the 6200 could have a street-price of $149 (128-bit) and $129 (64-bit). How can the 6200 (128-bit) even have the same price as the faster 6600 anyway? Its also outperformed by the $130 X600 Pro which makes a $149 price ridiculous. I think the 6200 will have to be priced more like the X300 and X300SE-- $100 and $75 for the 128-bit and 64-bit versions respectively, if they are to be successful.
Maybe most 6200's will end up being cheap 64-bit cards that are sold to people who aren't really bothered about gaming, or who mistakenly believe the amount of memory is the most important factor. You just have to look at how many 64-bit FX5200's are sold.
Shinei - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
The PT Barnum theory, wilburpan. There's a sucker born every minute, and if they're willing to drop $60 for a 64-bit version of a card when they could have had a 128-bit version, so much the better for profits. The FX5200 continues to be one of the best selling AGP cards on the market, despite the fact that it's worse than a Ti4200 at playing games, let alone DX9 games.wilburpan - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
"The first thing to notice here is that the 6200 supports either a 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus, and as far as NVIDIA is concerned, they are not going to be distinguishing cards equipped with either a 64-bit or 128-bit memory configuration."This really bothers me a lot. If I knew there were two versions of this card, I definitely would want to know which version I was buying.
What would be the rationale for such a policy?
wilburpan - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
nserra - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
Why do you all keep talking about the Geforce 6600 cards (buying them) when the X700 was the clear winner?You all want to buy the worst card (less performing)? I dont understand.
Why dont anantech use 3Dmark05?
No doubt that mine 9700 was a magnificent buy almost 2 years ago. What a piece of cheat are the Geforce FX line of cards....
Why didnt they use one (a 5600/5700) just to see...
Even 4pipe line Ati cards can keep up with 8 pipe nvidia, gee what a mess... old tech yeah right.
coldpower27 - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
I am very happy you included Sims 2 into your benchmark suite:)I think this game like the amount of vertex processor on X700 plus it's advanatge in fillrate and memory bandwidth, could you please test the Sims 2 when you can on the high end cards from both vendors? :P
jediknight - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
What I'm wondering is.. how do previous generation top-of-the-line cards stack up to current gen mainstream cards?AnonymouseUser - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
Saist, you are an idiot."OpenGl was never really big on ATi's list of supported API's... However, adding in Doom3, and the requirement of OGL on non-Windows-based systems, and OGL is at least as important to ATi now as DirectX."
Quake 3, RtCW, HL, CS, CoD, SW:KotOR, Serious Sam (1&2), Painkiller, etc, etc, etc, etc, are OpenGL games. Why would they ONLY NOW want to optimize for OpenGL?
Avalon - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Nice review on the budget sector. It's good to see a review from you again, Anand :)Bonesdad - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Affordable gaming??? Not until the 6600GT AGP's come out...affordable is not replacing your mobo, cpu and video card...