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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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.