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NVIDIA GeForce 6200 Preview

NVIDIA is today launching a brand new video card aimed at the low-end entry-level market, we tell you what its all about, what it means to you, and how it performs in real-world gaming.

Introduction:

When NVIDIA launched their next generation NV40 GPU back in April they talked a lot about parallelism and scalability. They made sure it was known that this new architecture was capable of scaling in such a way that they could still offer every single feature of the high-end enthusiast level and bring those features all the way down to the entry-level market and price point that OEMs love best.

We are sure many of you are familiar with the GeForce4 MX series of video cards. The GeForce4 MX series is well known for being one of the most mislabeled products in video card history. When people looked at the product name you thought you were getting a video card based on GeForce4 series technology, but in reality you were getting a video card that was nothing more than a "souped up" GeForce2.

NVIDIA realized and corrected their mistake with the GeForceFX line that followed the GeForce4 series. In their GeForceFX line NVIDIA created the GeForceFX 5200 to replace the GeForce4 MX series. This time they got it right by moving the DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 nature of the NV30/35 GPU series into this card. While the GeForceFX 5200 may not have been the fastest card on the block, it at least did support all the 3D features of its big brothers, and was labeled accordingly.

Now with the GeForce 6 series NVIDIA is doing it right again by moving all of the technology from the GeForce 6800 series into the GeForce 6600 series and into their entry-level product. To familiarize yourself with the inner workings of the GeForce 6 series please check out our GeForce 6 Series Tech article, Every technology you see packed into their $500 video card you will find in this new entry level video card, just likely not as much of it. You may also want to check out our Preview of the GeForce 6600GT which is the mainstream GeForce 6 series of cards that also use the same technology and features.

The GeForce 6200:

Welcome to the GeForce 6200. The GeForce 6200 is not for the enthusiast gaming crowd. This video card is geared for the entry-level market who do other things besides just gaming. It has a heavy emphasis on video features through the programmable video processor, which you will be hearing more about soon. This might also be an option for people with integrated graphics who wish to have something a little more powerful, but don’t want to spend a fortune. The largest market that this will cater directly to are OEMs that like to offer the least expensive add-in-card they can in their systems and claim to have all the latest 3D features.

In the first slide above you can see where the GeForce 6200 sits in relation to the 6600 and 6800 series. As you can see this is a 4 pixel-pipeline video card operating on a 128-bit memory bus. The GeForce 6600 series as you recall is an 8 pipeline part with 3 vertex units. The GeForce 6200 also has 3 vertex units, but has 4 pipelines. The process being used on the GeForce 6200 is the same 110 nanometer process being used for the GeForce 6600 series.

Above you can see pictures of the reference GeForce 6200 sent to us for testing by NVIDIA. This is a simple, small, single-slot design using TSOP memory. It is interesting to note that ours has active cooling, but you may in fact see some versions with passive cooling.

The RAM being used is Hynix HY5DU281622ET 3.6ns modules, which are rated at 277MHz. The GeForce 6200 GPU is native PCI-Express which is certified through PCI-SIG.

Feature-wise the GeForce 6200 supports most of the features of the GeForce 6800 and 6600 series. It does support Shader Model 3.0 which is all part of CineFX 3.0, it does support Ultrashadow II, it does support the FP16 framebuffer, and it does support FP32 precision. It does however only have limited support of Intellisample 3.0. The GeForce 6200 does not support compression in AA for Z or Color, which is odd to us. You might think this would be the level of video card where compression technologies would benefit it the most. There is also no support for SLI configurations.