GeForce 6200 TurboCache: PCI Express Made Useful

Half-Life 2 Performance

Here is the raw data we collected from our Half-Life 2 performance analysis. The data shows fairly consistent performance across all the levels we test.

Half-Life 2 1024x768 Performance
	at_canals_08	at_coast_05	at_coast_12	at_prison_05	at_c17_12
GeForce 6200 (128-bit)	43.6	65.23	50.4	41.57	45.84
GeForce 6200 (TC-64b)	38.26	61.81	48.2	38.92	42.11
Radeon X300	34.3	57.54	39.14	32.62	40.69
GeForce 6200 (TC-32b)	31.66	51.09	39.72	30.69	34.1
Radeon X300 SE	29.59	52.42	34.91	30.55	37.01

The X300 SE and new 32-bit TurboCache cards are very evenly matched here. The original 6200 leads every time, but the TC versions do hold their own fairly well. The regular X300 isn't quite able to keep up with the 64-bit version of the 6200 TurboCache, especially in particularly GPU limited levels. This comes across in a higher average performance at high resolutions.

Again, Unlike Doom 3, the TurboCache parts are able to keep up with the 128-bit 6200 part fairly well. This has to do with the ammount of memory bandwidth required to process each pixel, and HL2 is more evenly balanced between being GPU dependant and memory bandwidth dependant.
We can see from the resolution scaling chart that in cases other than 1024x764, the competition between the X300 series and the 6200 TurboCache parts is a wash. It is impressive that all these cards run HL2 at very playable framerates in all our tests.