Shopinator.com - Free Reviews of products.

Nvidia GeForce 6200 PCI Express graphics card review.
The Nvidia GeForce 6200 PCI Express card is based on the NV43 core which gives it full DirectX 9 and is aimed firmly at the basic PCI Express entry level market.

The GeForce 6200 does not have SLI support and none of the NV43's colour or Z-buffer optimisations along with no 64-bit texture rendering perhaps as you would expect for a basic entry level graphics card but it is made using 0.11 micron process.

There is no AGP GeForce 6200 version expected as that would mean that this better architecture graphics card would compete with the existing Nvidia FX 5200.

The Nvidia GeForce 6200 is expected to be available in two versions, one with a 64-bit memory bus and another with a 128-bit memory bus.

Graphics cards quick reference guide.

	GeForce 6200	GeForce 6600 & 6600 GT	GeForce 6800 Ultra 128/256/512MB
Manufacturing process	0.11 micron	0.11 micron	0.13 micron
Chip technology	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Transistor count	146 million	146 million	222 million
Core clock speed.	300MHz	300MHz / 500MHz GT	400MHz
Memory type	GDDR1	GDDR1 / GDDR3 GT	?
Memory clock speed.	275MHz (DDR=550MHz)	500MHz (DDR=1000MHz) GT	550MHz (DDR=1100MHz)
Memory Bus width	64/128-bit	128-bit GDDR3	256-bit GDDR3
Memory bandwidth.	?	14.4 & 16.0GB/sec	35.2GB/sec
Rendering Pixel pipelines.	4	8	16
Texture units per pipeline.	1	1	1
Textures per Texture unit	?	?	?
Pixel fill rate.	?	1.6 & 2.0Gpixels/sec	?
Vertex shader units.	3	3	6
Colour bits per channel	10	10	10
PCI Express/AGP 4x/8X	Yes + DX9	Yes + DX9	Yes + DX9
Max displays/Ramdacs	2/2	2/2	2/2

Nvidia GeForce 6200 PCI Express graphics card.
GeForce 6200 as we can see here is a very basic graphics card but it does have most of the features of the NV43 core.

With only 4 pixel pipelines, smaller memory bus and slower core and memory speeds the performance is going to take a big hit. In addition with no colour and z-compression support to reduce memory bandwidth needed performance will take an even bigger hit with the use of AA and anisotropic filtering with this GeForce 6200.

There is support for Shader Model 3, Nvidia's latest 4X RGMS multi-sampling anti-aliasing and 16X angle-adaptive anisotropic filtering in the 6200.

Nvidia Ultra Shadow II.
Nvidia Ultra Shadow II technology is also available in this 6200 card which enables Nvidia to have the edge on ATI in Doom 3.

Inverse Telecine & Motion Compensation.
For producing better quality video playback pictures. Inverse Telecine cleans up the blur in an image that is created by motion in video playback making the scenes have sharper and more defined edges.

Motion Compensation is to improve the overall video image quality of curved lines in a picture.

Nvidia GeForce 6200 PCI Express graphics card thoughts.
These GeForce 6200 cards will no doubt be use by OEM computer makers as it provides them with a very cheap graphics card that offers all the modern graphics features wanted for basic computing along with the competing ATI X600 for this PCI Express entry level graphics card market selling for about the same price as the 6200 is expected to sell for.

Any graphics card with only 4 pixel pipelines and running at slow core and memory speeds is not going to offer what we would call decent performance but offer only the very basic performance needed in a basic graphics card in this GeForce 6200.

We always say that adding a little more money to your budget which will let you buy a graphics card with much better performance than the Nvidia GeForce 6200 along with most or all the features that are disabled in the very basic 6200 card. For example buying one of the GeForce 6600 or ATI X700 versions.

The added benefit by buying a more expensive graphics card is that because it performance is so much better it gives you a longer effective life unlike a really basic card that needs to replaced much quicker and of course you enjoy the much better performance all the time as well.

Nvidia is expected to start shipping this GeForce 6200 card next month so quite when they will be in the shops and on sale is any ones guess.

Shopinator		The best source for a review on any product.



		Copyright Shopinator 2005 - Free Reviews