NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 & 6600 non-GT: Affordable Gaming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 11, 2004 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Star Wars Battlefront Performance
Released alongside the latest Star Wars DVDs, Battlefront has become popular quickly, thanks to the large scale feel of its battles as well as fairly decent graphics. There is no built-in benchmark in this game, so we developed an easily repeatable path to take during the second mission of the Clone Wars single player campaign that resulted in fairly consistent frame rates between runs. We used FRAPS to record the average frame rate during the sequence.The Radeon X700 completely destroys the competition here with an average of 85 fps compared to the next highest Radeon X600 Pro at 45 fps. We have no explanation for the poor performance of the GeForce 6 cards; there were no visual anomalies, so it's either a driver performance issue or an issue with the game and the GeForce 6 architecture.
We continue to see fairly linear scaling with resolution across all of the cards, but it is most pronounced on the X700, since its producing much higher frame rates than the rest of the cards. Interestingly enough, the X700 at 1280x1024 is faster than any of the other cards at 800x600.
Notes from the Lab
ATI X300SE: 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.ATI X600 Pro: The mouse is very laggy at 12x10, and performance is a bit better than the 6600 in average frame rates, but not really noticeable in actual gameplay. For all intents and purposes, the X600 Pro performs similarly to the 6600.
ATI X700: The X700 serverely outperforms the competition here - wow. And it is quite noticeable in game play. 1280x1024 was a little slow in areas, but 1024x768 was perfect.
NVIDIA GeForce 6200: An OK performer; at resolutions above 800x600, the card isn't nearly as responsive as we would like it to be.
NVIDIA GeForce 6600: Interestingly enough, the 6600 doesn't feel that much faster than the 6200, but you can start to tell more of a difference at the higher resolutions.
Intel Integrated Graphics: Starting the game with just the 915G's integrated graphics gives us the following warning:
Remember that Intel's graphics core has no vertex shaders. All vertex operations are handled by the CPU; thus, it fails to meet the specifications of many games that require hardware vertex shaders. Luckily, most games allow you to continue playing despite the error, but in this case, the display driver would just crash while running Battlefront.
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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.