XFX GeForce 6200TC

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 new custom timedemo that teams us up with "Dog" through an explosive clash with the enemy. These tests were run at resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

At a resolution of 800x600, the Radeon X300 produced the highest average framerate with a score of roughly 65fps. Somewhat close behind, the XFX GeForce 6200TC returned an average framerate of 55fps. Surprisingly enough, the Intel IGP struggled through the test and managed to actually complete the benchmark with a lackluster 5fps. As we would expect, enabling 4x FSAA and 8x AF produced a large performance hit for the XFX card as it lacks color and Z-compression. The Intel IGP rendered the benchmark into a slideshow and could not complete the test. Once again, the ATI card reigned supreme with a very playable average framerate of 40fps.

Raising the resolution to 1024x768, we find a few surprises amongst the expected results. As we would imagine, the Radeon X300 walks away with the fastest average framerate in both the default test and with FSAA and AF enabled. At default settings, the gap between the cards was again roughly 10fps. Surprisingly enough though, the gap between the cards with FSAA and AF enabled was less than 2fps. This is in stark contrast to the previous resolution where the gap was almost 13fps! This shows that there is enough horsepower in the GeForce 6200TC to handle the increase in resolution and that the key missing architecture components (namely color and Z-compression) are to blame for the bottleneck.

Lastly, we punished the cards on hand by raising the resolution to 1280x1024. Here, the Radeon X300 managed to barely break the playability limit of 30fps, with the XFX card coming close at 25fps. Turning on FSAA and AF rendered each card almost unplayable with results well under 20fps. Before we complain, we must remind ourselves that we're dealing with sub $100 graphics card and have little room to ask for more from such an intensive game.