Introduction

2004 has proven to be a busy year for NVIDIA’s graphics team. After starting the year off with three GeForce high-end 6800 products (a fourth was added over the summer), NVIDIA followed up with less expensive GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT, both of which deliver performance comparable to 2003’s high-end $500 cards (if not more) in some cases. With next generation DirectX 9 games such as Far Cry and Half-Life 2 being released at an increasing pace, the need for a good DX9 card has never been greater. In fact, one game we saw over the summer that will be shipping next year, Gearbox Software’s Brothers In Arms, will require at least a DirectX 8-level graphics card. What’s a gamer to do if he wants a speedy card but doesn’t have the cash for a GeForce 6600 GT or GeForce 6800? If NVIDIA has their way, he’ll get a GeForce 6200!

GeForce 6200 chip

GeForce 6200 reference board

Designed to appeal to the consumer on a budget who’s upgrading his system from an integrated graphics solution, the GeForce 6200 is NVIDIA’s latest part for the value market, where the bulk of sales takes place. The GeForce 6200 is a PCI Express-only part, NVIDIA has no plans for an AGP version, so you won’t see consumers upgrading from their GeForce2 MX’s or other older cards to it.

Like NVIDIA’s other GeForce 6 series cards, the GeForce 6200 supports shader model 3.0 and is based on NVIDIA’s new NV4x architecture, which has been revamped to drastically improve 2.0 shader performance and anti-aliasing quality via a new rotated-grid sampling pattern, NVIDIA has also integrated a new video processor on all GeForce 6 products. While this product hasn’t officially launched yet (drivers to enable it on today’s GeForce 6800 and 6600 parts are in the works), NVIDIA has gone on the record to state that it will provide on-chip MPEG-2/WMV9 decoding as well as video encoding via a new “motion estimation engine”.

In order to keep manufacturing cost down, GeForce 6200 features half as many pipelines as GeForce 6600, four instead of eight. One texture unit per pixel pipeline is paired alongside, giving the GeForce 6200 the same 4x1 architecture as ATI’s DX9 value offering for the PCI Express market, RADEON X300. NVIDIA clocks GeForce 6200’s core at 300MHz, 25MHz slower than X300, while the board ships with a 128-bit memory interface that’s clocked at 275MHz (550MHz effective). This figure is 75MHz higher than X300, giving the GeForce 6200 significantly more memory bandwidth.

To further reduce costs, NVIDIA drops the z and color compression algorithms found in GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600, so the AA engine isn’t as robust. This will result in reduced performance at high resolutions and/or the use of anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering. The 64-bit texture filtering and blending found in the 6800 and 6600 series, as well as SLI are also omitted from GeForce 6200.

The back of the card

Another shot of the reference board

Like GeForce 6600, GeForce 6200 is based on TSMC’s 0.11-micron manufacturing process and still features dual 400MHz RAMDACs for TwinView support. NVIDIA only mentions one GeForce 6600 SKU, but we wouldn’t be surprised if additional variants are added later. After all, we’ve seen NVIDIA go back and add additional cards as the market requires, the GeForce FX 5700 LE and GeForce FX 5900 XT being popular recent examples.