NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with TurboCache

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with TurboCache - Page 8
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 15, 2004, 07:59 AM EDT

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

It Shipped! And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions of gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. So when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid 2003, gamers the world over began chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this gem. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,280 x 1,024 without any AA or aniso and with 2X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Both of the GeForce 6200 boards with TurboCache had their best performance in our custom Half Life 2 benchmark. At 1024x768 without any anti-aliasing the GeForce 6200 TurboCache 32-TC/128MB breaches the 40FPS barrier, and with AA and aniso enabled it maintained a framerate just above the 20 FPS mark. The GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16-TC/128MB board also did relatively well at 1024x768, where it did run with AA enabled, although it trailed its 32MB counterpart by about a third of its peformance. With the resolution increased to 1280x1024, both cards take a big performance hit, but were still able to complete the test properly, and run with AA and anisotropic filtering enabled.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, turbo, force, cache, 6200, AC, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com