NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 & 6600 non-GT: Affordable Gaming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 11, 2004 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Doom 3 Performance
While the Doom 3 frenzy isn't nearly as bad as it was a month ago, the performance seen under id's latest engine is quite important as there are a number of games in development right now using the Doom 3 engine. We have two sets of benchmarks here to look at - playable resolution benchmarks, as well as a chart of performance vs. resolution to see how the cards compare at sometimes not-so-playable resolutions.Since we're dealing with relatively entry-level cards, we found that the perfect balance between frame rate and image quality lands at 800x600, and thus, that's where our first graph comes from.
Here, we see that the GeForce 6600, despite its lower fill rate and lower memory bandwidth, is still able to outperform the regular X700 by about 8%. It's not a huge margin, but impressive considering that the card is underpowered compared to the X700. The explanation as to "why" is more of an architectural discussion, as we've seen that NVIDIA's GeForce 6 series of GPUs are much better suited for the Doom 3 engine than ATI's.
The GeForce 6200 comes in a valiant third, clearly outperforming the 4-pipe competitors from ATI and nipping away at the heels of the slightly more expensive X700. Here's the tricky part though. Depending on what price the 6200 and X700 are actually available for when they hit the streets, the recommendation could go either way. At the same price, the X700 is the clear winner here, but at a higher price, the decision becomes more of a question of budget rather than which one to pick.
Next, we have the resolution scaling chart to see how all of these cards fair in the grander scheme of things. Here, we see that none of the cards are particularly CPU limited under Doom 3 and all of them experience a serious drop in performance as you increase the resolution. Doom 3 is clearly taxing enough for even the fastest of contenders here.
What about playability? We took some notes during our testing of the cards and will share them here as to what our gaming experiences were with all of the cards in a section we like to call "Notes from the Lab".
ATI X300: The card is clearly slower than the 6200. The added memory bandwidth gives it a performance advantage over the 64-bit SE, but it's nowhere near in the same league as the 6200. ATI desperately needs to have an X800 derived part for their low-end, much like they have in the mid-range with the X700.
ATI X300SE: The game plays "OK" at 640x480, definitely sluggish in certain areas. The aliasing is particularly bad at 640, so the resolution only really works if you have a small monitor or if the person playing isn't much of a gamer at all and has never been introduced to the fact that you can get rid of aliasing. At 800x600, things just get too slow for comfort and beyond that is basically unplayable.
ATI X600 Pro: You can't notice any visual quality differences between ATI and NVIDIA when it comes to Doom3, not to mention that the game is frankly too dark to notice any differences in texture filtering to begin with. 640x480 and 800x600 play quite well on the X600, despite the fact that the frame rate is clearly lower than the two NVIDIA cards. Unfortunately, anything above 800x600 is a bit too slow on the X600 Pro. It's "playable", but honestly, just frustratingly slow compared to the other cards.
ATI X700: The X700 performs clearly better than the X600 Pro and close to the 6600, but the 6600 is clearly faster in actual gameplay.
NVIDIA GeForce 6200: 800x600 seems to be a sweet spot of image quality to performance ratio for the 6200. The game played very smooth with no noticeable image quality issues. 1024x768 looked better, but started to get a little slow for our tastes. 1280x1024 was far too slow, although it looked great. If you want to go up to 1280, you're going to want to go for a 6600 at least.
NVIDIA GeForce 6600: At 800x600, the 6600 completely blows away the 6200; it makes the 6200 feel like a slow card. 1024x768 is still sluggish in places, but overall, much better than the 6200. 1280x1024 is fine when just walking around, but once you get enemies on the screen and they start attacking you, things slow down. It may be that it takes the 6600GT to truly be smooth at this resolution. That being said, it continues to amaze us about how good lower resolutions look in Doom 3.
Intel Integrated Graphics: Surprisingly enough, Intel's integrated graphics will actually run Doom3, but it is basically unplayable at medium quality at 640x480 - not to mention that we couldn't get it to complete a single benchmark run (the driver kept on crashing).
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Saist - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
xsliver : I think it's because ATi has generally cared more about optimizing for DirectX, and more recently just optimizing for API. 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. How long it will take to convert that priority into performance is unknown.Also, keep this in mind: Nvidia specifically built the Geforce mark-itecture from the ground up to power John Carmack's 3D dream. Nvidia has specifically stated they create their cards based on what Carmack says. Wether or not that is right or wrong I will leave up to you to decide, but that does very well explain the disparity between ID games and other games, even under OGL.
xsilver - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Just a conspiracy theory -- does the NV cards only perform well on the most popular / publicised games whereas the ATI cards excel due to a better written driver / better hardware?Or is the FRAPS testing biasing ATI for some reason?
Cygni - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
What do you mean "who has the right games"? If you want to play Doom3, look at the Doom3 graphs. If you want to play FarCry, look a the FarCry graphs. If you want to play CoH, Madden, or Thunder 04, look at HardOCP's graphs. Every game is going to handle the cards differently. I really dont see anything wrong with AnandTech's current group of testing programs.And Newegg now has 5 6600 non-GTs in stock, ranging in price from $175-$148. But remember that it takes time to test and review these cards. When Anand went to get a 6600, its very likely that that was the only card he could find. I know I couldnt find one at all a week ago.
T8000 - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Check this, a XFX 6600 in stock for just $143:http://www.gameve.com/gve/Store/ProductDetails.asp...
Furthermore, the games you pick for a review make a large difference for the conclusion. Because of that, HardOCP has the 6200 outperforming the x600 by a small margin. So, I would like to know who has the right games.
And #2:
The X700/X800 is simular enough to the 9800 to compare them on pipelines and clock speeds. Based on that, the x700 should perform about the same.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Thanks for the responses, here are some answers in no specific order:1) The X300 was omitted from the Video Stress Test benchmark because CS: Source was released before we could finish testing the X300, no longer giving us access to the beta. We will run the cards on the final version of CS: Source in future reviews.
2) I apologize for the confusing conclusion, that statement was meant to follow the line before it about the X300. I've made the appropriate changes.
3) No prob in regards to the Video Processor, I've literally been asking every week since May about this thing. I will get the full story one way or another.
4) I am working on answering some of your questions about comparing other cards to what we've seen here. Don't worry, the comparisons are coming...
Take care,
Anand
friedrice - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Here's my question, what is better? A Geforce 6800 or a Geforce 6600 GT? I wish there was like a Geforce round-up somewhere. And I saw some benchmarks that showed SLI does indeed work, but these were just used on 3dmark and anyone know if there is any actual tests out yet on SLI?Also to address another issue some of you have brought up, these new line of cards beat the 9800 Pro by a huge amount. But it's not worth the upgrade. Stick with what you have until it no longer works, and right now a 9800 Pro works just fine. Of course if you do need a new graphics card, the 6600 GT seems the way to go. If you can find someone that sells them.
O, and to address the pricing. nVidia only offers suggested retail prices. Vendors can up the price on parts so that they can still sell the inventory they have on older cards. In the next couple of months we should see these new graphics cards drop to the MSRP
ViRGE - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
#10, because it's still an MP game at the core. The AI is as dumb as rocks, and is there for the console users. Most PC users will be playing this online, not alone in SP mode.rbV5 - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Thanks for the tidbit on the 6800's PVP. I'd like to see Anandtech take on a video card round up aimed at video processing and what these cards are actually capable of. It would fit in nicely with the media software/hardware Andrew's been looking at, and let users know what to actually expect from their hardware.thebluesgnr - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Buyxtremegear has the GeForce 6600 from Leadtek for $135. Gameve has 3 different cards (Sparkle, XFX, Leadtek) all under $150 for the 128MB version.#1,
they're probably talking about the power consumption under full load.
Sunbird - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
All I hope is that the 128bit and 64bit versions have some easy way of distinguishing between them.