Date:
Monday , October 11, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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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.

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Test Setup:

ABIT AA8 (Intel 925X), Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz downclocked to 2.8GHz (14x200), 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS2 5400C4Pro Dual Channel DDR2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128MB – Operating at default clock speeds 300MHz/552MHz using ForceWare 66.81.

MSI Radeon X600XT 128MB Downclocked to 400MHz/600MHz to represent an X600Pro using Catalyst 4.9.

For our comparison today we will run game evaluations on each card. The direct competition for the GeForce 6200 is the Radeon X600Pro since they are similarly priced. We took an X600XT and downclocked it to X600Pro speeds to represent that product.

We are using a PCI-Express x16 Intel 925X platform with the ABIT AA8 and a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU for testing. We have downclocked this CPU to 2.8GHz for these video cards since these are geared for the entry-level market.

The games we are using for testing in this review are DOOM3, FarCry, City of Heroes, MADDEN NFL 2005, NASCAR Thunder 2004, Star Wars Battlefront, and The Sims 2.

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We are using new ForceWare beta 66.81 drivers on the GeForce 6200. NVIDIA has these beta drivers publicly downloadable on their website. We used the default control panel settings on each video card. For the ForceWare drivers this means Trilinear Optimization was ON, Anisotropic mip filter optimization was OFF, and Anisotropic sample Optimization was ON.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit different from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples”. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit of framerates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.