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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
nvdm24 - Sunday, December 19, 2004 - link
Many of the readers of these tech sites want to know the full capabilities of the cards, yet, sadly, reviewers at anandtech and every other tech site ignore the video capabilities of video cards. Even in the reviews for the new 6600 agp, the video aspect has not been tested by any reviewer despite the problems of the 6800. Never mind the fact that EVERY review of these cards is about the 3d aspect and is nearly the exact same - run halo, doom 3, hl 2, etc. and list the performance, yet no tests of dvd movies or the video aspect are conducted, thus doing a HUGE disservice to readers.nserra - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
I dont understand why on you previous 6200 review the X300 wins, loses (Doom3), and keep up, but now a much worst 6200 wins over X300. How the hell did that hapen, new nvidia drivers?nserra - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
I dont understand why on you previous 6200 review the X300 wins, loses (Doom3), and keep up, but now a much worst 6200 wins over X300. How the hell did that hapen, new nvidia drivers?IntelUser2000 - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Surprisingly, my 865G with Intel Extreme Graphics 2 can run Doom 3 beta at default, it still crashes, but when I run it, I get barely playable frames, I say around 20 at the highest and less than 10. I think the GMA900 should be much better, but maybe the DX9 support in it really sucks.nserra - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
#39 Thanks to the answer, but...Doesnt 2 cards cost more then one?
And whats the difference between having two 6600GT vs 6800GT? in price and performance?
I think this kind of "edge" could come in the future like the voodoo2 did, the card was getting old, people getting rid of it and "some" get them cheap just to keep their PC the longger time they could.
Confusednewbie1552 - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
#30Everyone wants 660GT because they are cheap and two of them can be put into SLI mode (once Nforce 4 comes out) which could mean better performance than the X700, and maybe even the X800.
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
I'm sure the core of the 6600 will overclock very well, but the memory all depends on the particular chips used and might not have any real headroom. That could be its main problem as its an 8-pipe 300MHz core so theres plenty of power there, but only 128-bit 500MHz (effective) memory which is what is probably holding it back. If thats the case then overclocking the core may not help very much.Its a pity no attempt to overclock was performed in the review, but then again the results from overclocking cards sent out by the manufacturer are always suspect as they could have hand-picked the best.
thebluesgnr - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
" I can't see how the 6200 could have a street-price of $149 (128-bit) and $129 (64-bit). "It's actually $129 for the 128MB 128-bit version and $149 for the 256MB 128-bit version. The 64-bit version (only 128MB) should have an MSRP of $100, according to the Inquirer.
So nVidia has:
$100 6200 128MB 64-bit
$130 6200 128MB 128-bit
$150 6200 256MB 128-bit
$150 6600 128MB 128-bit
$200 6600GT 128MB 128-bit
In my opinion ATI beats all nVidia cards except for their $200, where the 6600GT wins. But we can't forget the 6600 has a great overclocking potential, and street prices should be lower than the X700's, because of the slower memory.
Like already mentioned, you can find the 6600 for $135 already.
mkruer - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
To X700 XT or to 9800 Pro, that is the questionneo229 - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
I also wish to thank you for keeping up the fight to unravel the mystery behind the mysterious video processor. That notion of that feature really got me excited when I first heard about it, yet site after site after site reviewed these cards without even touching on the subject.