NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with TurboCache

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the GeForce 6200 boards with TurboCache technology on a DFI LANPARTY 925X-T2 Intel i925X chipset-based motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults."  The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers, then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.

The HotHardware Test System Intel-Powered Screamer

Performance Comparisons With 3DMark05 Futuremark's Latest - The Jury is Still Out...

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October 1998 and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of its audience with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on both of the 6200 cards we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

Neither of the 6200 boards with TurboCache posted impressive scores in 3DMark05, but it's not the score that's most important here.  The fact that a sub-$100 video card with only 16MB or 32MB of local memoery has the ability to complete this benchmark, and render all of the imagery properly, is what should be noted.

Performance Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01 A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant to check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1,024 x 768) with antialiasing disabled.

In what is probably the least demanding benchmark in our suite, the GeForce 6200's with TurboCache produced scored roughly 1/3 to 1/2 those of mid-range cards like the GeForce 6600 of Radeon X700.  With a score of 2569, the GeForce 6200 TurboCache 32-TC/128MB more than doubled the performance of the GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16-TC/128MB.  The GeForce 6200 TurboCache 32-TC/128MB's performance increase comes from having double the amount of directly connected on-board RAM, and having more total memory bandwidth available.