Our impressions

Unfortunately, we don’t have a reference GeForce 6200 board, so we can’t provide benchmark figures for you, but we can come to some general conclusions based on the board’s specifications as we know them, and the competitive landscape of today’s 3D market.

GeForce 6200 card back plate

First, with an estimated street price of $129 for a 128MB card and $149 for a 256MB board, the GeForce 6200 will be priced very close to NVIDIA’s already announced GeForce 6600. The base model GeForce 6600 ships with a 300MHz core clock, but sports twice as many pipelines and a fully-featured Intellisample AA engine. In other words, we expect it to deliver roughly twice the performance of GeForce 6200 and only cost a little bit more.

Therefore, for gamers looking for a card that will deliver the most performance with today’s games such as DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2, we’d recommend the low-end mainstream cards such as the RADEON X700 and GeForce 6600 over 6200. You’ll pay a little bit more but we believe you’ll likely get significantly better performance. The introduction of these cards, as well as GeForce 6200 will likely force ATI to lower prices on RADEON X600 and X300, but to what extent we just don’t know yet.

NVIDIA expects the 6200 to perform and eventually be priced similarly to the RADEON X600 PRO, but we won’t know that answer until the GeForce 6200 debuts, NVIDIA doesn’t expect that to occur until late November. Based on NVIDIA’s track record with GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600 and the fact that we don’t have a 6200 board yet, we wouldn’t be surprised if that ship date slips a little bit.

In short, while we’re glad to see another inexpensive DirectX 9 option out there, we think most of our readers will be better served by going with one of the 8 pipeline mainstream cards. We already have a retail version of one of these cards, the Sapphire Hybrid RADEON X700 PRO, and will be posting a review later this week. In the meantime, the GeForce 6200 will no doubt offer a substantial performance improvement over the DX9 integrated graphics that are prevalent on most value systems, and has all the ingredients to deliver more performance than ATI’s RADEON X300, but with the increasing demands of today’s latest games we really think you’d have a more enjoyable experience with one of the more robust lower end mainstream cards. If you truly can’t afford one of these cards however, or don’t see yourself playing any of these games in the near future, the GeForce 6200 would serve nicely. It’s dual 400MHz RAMDACs and video processor should make it a capable solution for these applications.