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

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.