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Introduction

Today we do a quick preview of Nvidia's 6200 series. Once again we refer back to Editor's Day back in April because they gave everyone a boatload of information there. Jen Hsun Huang's rallying speech for Nvidia claimed that they would have a top to bottom lineup of NV4x derived parts by the end of the year and the announcement of the GeForce 6200 validates that statement as Nvidia will have parts in each segment of the market from the value oriented 6200s, midrange 6600s , and enthusiast 6800 series.

Technology

Be sure to check out some of previous articles on the technology behind the NV40 including our 6800 Tech Preview and reviews of NV4x family products including eVga's 6800 Ultra, BFG's 6800 OC GT and a preview of Nvidia's 6600GT.

Specifications

The Nvidia NV4x series has pipelines that work in quads which is why we see parts with 16 pipes in the 6800 Ultra/GT, 12 pipes in the 6800, 8 pipes in the 6600 series and 4 pipes in the 6200s. The 6200 sports a 128-bit memory bus part like the 6600 series.

The configuration of the 6200 puts it up squarely against the 5700 series and the 9600/X600 series from ATI as they are all 4x1 pipeline configurations. Memory bandwidth however will be constrained as the 6200 is specced with DDR1, not GDDR3 which will likely put the memory in the range of 400-700 Mhz which would give the 6200 less raw memory bandwidth than the 5700 Ultra which utilized 1 Ghz GDDR3. The memory architecture of the NV40 family however has been improved so that this may not be indicative of performance.

Nvidia emphasized that the target market for the 6200 is not necessarily the casual gamer but those who are using integrated graphics, especially in the case of something like the Intel 915G - even an entry level card will provide a massive increase in performance. With the 6200 series, Nvidia is looking to do a consumer education program with PCs in conjunction with their "The way it is meant to be played" slogan that they use to certify games that work right out of the box with Nvidia hardware. This should hopefully clear up some confusion as to why a 499$ box with a 80 gig HD is not the same as a 699$ box with a discrete graphics card and a 80 gig HD.

There are some differences between the 6200 and the other cards in the Nvidia 6000 series - 64-bit texture filtering and blending is lost and so is color compression. As with the regular 6600, there is no SLI support for the 6200 parts. Like the 6600 series, there are 3 vertex pipes on the 6200.