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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DOOM 3

(OpenGL)

We are using the full retail version of DOOM 3 and leaving each video card's driver control panel to “Application Preference” for AA and AF. We set the DOOM 3 in-game quality setting and resolution that played the best on each card.

For our manual run-through we chose the “Enpro” level and used FRAPS to capture the framerate every second and started our run-through from the beginning to halfway through the mission. We played the game in a normal fashion which means each run-through on each card will be a little different, but still represents the same course through the level.

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In DOOM 3 the GeForce 6200 was clearly the superior card providing better performance and a better experience in this game. We found that Medium Quality 800x600 played the best on the GeForce 6200. As you can see from the graph we only dropped to 33FPS. In some of the maps like Hell1 the framerate did drop into the upper 20’s at these settings when there were a lot of characters throwing fireballs. For comparison in our DOOM 3 Hardware Guide we achieved a playable setting of Medium Quality 640x480 on the GeForceFX 5200 Ultra 256MB video card.

With the Radeon X600Pro we had to lower the quality down to Low Quality at 800x600. Even at Low Quality we still dropped down to 20FPS with this card. We also found that you could do Medium Quality at 640x480 on the Radeon X600Pro, but we felt having the resolution higher offered better image quality. There isn’t a large noticeable difference between Low and Medium Quality settings image quality wise.

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In the screenshot comparisons above we did not notice any large image quality differences between Low Quality and Medium Quality, but what we did notice, as you can see in the third screenshot above, is the large performance difference.