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

Anti-Aliasing Performance

Although the GeForce 6200 lacks the color and z-compression support that the 6600 has, we've already seen that it is not a fast enough card to run at the high resolutions that would benefit from those features with AA enabled.

We also see from the following benchmarks that the loss of color and z-compression does not negatively impact anti-aliasing performance at playable resolutions with the GeForce 6200. For the sake of simplicity, we left off cards that were simply too slow.

Under Doom 3, the move to 2X AA is a huge hit on all cards. There is a slight difference in the performance penalty between the 6200 and 6600 here. With 2X AA enabled, the GeForce 6600 offers around 79% of its original performance, while the 6200 offers only 75%. It's not a huge difference, which leads us to believe that NVIDIA made the right tradeoff in removing color and z-compression from the 6200 series. It honestly won't matter to most users.

Under UT2004, the impact from AA is much less pronounced as even the GeForce 6200 is still fairly CPU bound even with 2X AA enabled. The 6200 does take a bigger hit from enabling AA (89% of its original performance in 2X mode) when compared to the 6600 (93% of its original performance in 2X mode), but again, it's nothing dramatic.