NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 & 6600 non-GT: Affordable Gaming

Halo Performance

Although Halo 2 is due out next month on the Xbox, the only Halo action that PC gamers will be getting is from the currently available Halo PC title. It is still pretty fun and well played, thanks to its multi-player modes and thus, we still use it as a benchmark. We ran the built-in timedemo with the - use20 extension to force Pixel Shader 2.0 shaders when possible.

The standings are similar in Halo to what we've already seen, with the X700 leader, and the 6200 basically performing as well as the X600 Pro.


We see that at 640x480 and even a little bit at 800x600, there are some elements of CPU limitations, but by the time you're at 1024x768, most of the CPU limitations have faded away. Once again, we see that regardless of resolution; the GeForce 6200 and Radeon X600 Pro perform identically to one another.

Notes from the Lab

Intel Integrated Graphics: We were greeted with another error when attempting to run the Intel benchmarks:

Luckily, Halo let us continue and the card actually worked reasonably well. The image quality was clearly inferior to everything else - especially in texture filtering quality, the amount of shimmering in the game was incredible. But if you ask, "does it work?" and "can I play the game?", then the answer is "Yes." It makes Halo look like a game from 1999, but it works. The reason for the warning is because the integrated graphics has no built-in vertex processing, which Halo requires to be able to run. But with a fast enough CPU, you should be fine, which is what Intel was going for with their integrated graphics architecture to begin with.