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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Sunbird - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
bpt8056 - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Anand, thanks so much for updating us on the PVP feature in the NV40. I think it's high-time somebody held nVidia accountable for a "broken" feature. Do you know if the PVP is working in the PCI-Express version (NV45)? Any information you can get would be great. Thanks Anand!mczak - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
That's an odd conclusion... "In most cases, the GeForce 6200 does significantly outperform the X300 and X600 Pro, its target competitors from ATI."But looking at the results, the X600Pro is _faster_ in 5 of 8 benchmarks (sometimes significantly), 2 are a draw, and only slower in 1 (DoomIII, by a significant margin). Not to disregard DoomIII, but if you base your conclusion entirely on that game alone why do you even bother with the other titles?
I just can't see why that alone justifies "...overall, the 6200 takes the crown".
There are some other odd comments as well, for instance at the Star Wars Battlefront performance: "The X300SE is basically too slow to play this game. There's nothing more to it. The X300 doesn't make it much better either." Compared to the 6200 which gets "An OK performer;..." but is actually (very slightly) slower than the X300?
gordon151 - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
"In most cases, the GeForce 6200 does significantly outperform the X300 and X600 Pro, its target competitors from ATI."Eh, am I missing something or wasnt it the X600 Pro the card that significantly outperformed the 6200 in almost all areas with the exception of Doom3.
dragonic - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
#6 Why would they drop it because the multiplayer framerate is locked? They benchmark using the single player, not the multiplayerDAPUNISHER - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Thanks Anand! I've been on about the PVP problems with nV40 for months now, and have become increasing fustrated with the lack of information and/or progress by nV. Now that a major site is pursuing this with vigor I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that answers will be forthcoming one way or another!Again, thanks for making this issue a priority and emphatically stating you will get more information for us. It's nV vs Anand so "Rumble young man! Rumble!" :-)
AlphaFox - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
if you ask me, all these low end cards are stupid if you have a PCIe motherboard.. who the heck would get one of these crappy cards if they spent all the money for a brand new PCIe computer??? these cards would be perfect for AGP as they are now going to start to be lower end..ROcHE - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
How would a 9800 Pro do against these card?ViRGE - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
Unless LucasArts changes something Anand, you may want to drop the Battlefront test. With multiplayer, the framerate is locked to the tick rate(usually 20FPS), so its performance is nearly irrelivant.PS #1, he's talking about the full load graph, not the idle graph
teng029 - Monday, October 11, 2004 - link
"For example, the GeForce 6600 is supposed to have a street price of $149, but currently, it's selling for closer to $170. So, as the pricing changes, so does our recommendation."i have yet to see the 6600 anywhere. pricewatch only lists two aopen cards (both well over 200.00) it and newegg doesn't carry it. i'm curious as to where he got the 170.00 street price.