Albatron GeForce TC 6200 Q

The Little Card that Could

by Josh Walrath

UT 2004

            I used the DM-Antalus map, which is a fairly complex outdoor map, along with 12 bots.  Settings were at high quality 32 bit with no AA or AF enabled.

            The 6200 TC does not break any records here, but it is very playable at stock at 1024x768.  At any higher resolution though, the game will drop below 20 fps, which makes for a very jerky gaming experience.  Once everything is overclocked though, 1280 x 1024 becomes very playable, and the increased resolution helps quality out a great deal.  But for those looking for the smoothest gaming experience, overclocking the board and keeping it at 1024 x 768 is the best bet.

            For those wishing to put some more quality into the scene, let’s take a look at what applying AF and AA do to performance.  The first anisotropic filtering tests were done at 1024 x 768 at high quality 32 bit rendering.

            We can see that NVIDIA’s AF algorithm is very efficient (though not as nice looking as the GeForce FX unit), and the framerate hit from 0X to 16X AF is 3.6 fps.  There is very little visual difference between 8X and 16X, and for all intents setting AF at 8X is a very solid experience for the user.

            Now, with the limited bandwidth onboard for the 6200 TC, anti-aliasing could be a bit of a problem.  While multi-sampling units are more efficient than supersampling, it still takes up a lot of memory bandwidth.  The same botmatch was used with these results as those above.  Settings are at 1024 x 768, high quality, and 4X AF.

            At stock speeds anti-aliasing is not an option.  Even with just 2X AA the framerate hit makes this a very unattractive situation.  Only when overclocked does the 6200 TC have the power to successfully apply 2X AA and still maintain above a 30 fps average.  4X AA is just too much of a jump for this board at average resolutions.  To further explore, I decided to test at 800 x 600 with all the quality settings enabled at 4X AA.

            At 800 x 600 at 4X AA, the situation improves, but still remains only playable on the overclocked card.  4X really just is not an option for the 6200 TC in a first person shooter. 

Doom 3

            NVIDIA has had a stranglehold on Doom 3 performance due to their excellent OpenGL support.  Doom 3 is also a very graphically intensive game that should push any video card to its limit.  I tested resolutions at both High Quality and Medium Quality.  Ultra Quality was avoided, as it makes massive use of stored textures, which is inappropriate for a card with only 64 MB of onboard memory and a high dependence on Turbo Cache.

            At both stock and overclocked settings, the 6200 TC performs very well at 640 x 480.  While this is a pretty low resolution, it doesn’t look all that bad due to the overall design of Doom 3.  When we raise the resolution to 800 x 600 we see that the stock card is just barely getting to 30 fps, but it has spikes down to the teens in terms of frame rates.  The overclocked board does very well at 800 x 600, and should provide the user with a more immersive experience due to the higher resolution.

            We can see that using the High Quality setting only results in a small framerate hit.  The stock card can still run it fine at 640 x 480, but it starts to really slow down at 800 x 600.  The overclocked setup still maintains very good rates at resolutions up to 800 x 600.

Next: Half Life 2 Results

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