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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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.