Hello everyone and welcome to a really quick preview of NVIDIA's latest product launch, the all new GeForce 6200. As tends to become usual these releases are always last minute... and well...  more last minute then this one, it honestly can't be. It's now 2PM and I received information from NVIDIA that they'll be releasing GeForce 6200 at yes, yes... 4 PM; leaving me with exactly 2 hours to write this little article.

Hey... I'm a guru... I can do that! This little feature will be short and simple though.

In addition to the brief notice, the product samples have not arrived also... and that's for all of Europe's press. It seems the 6200 samples are stuck in customs for whatever reason right now. So this'll be a quick write-up on NVIDIA's GeForce 6200, which is of course the all new low-budget ~ 120-130 USD graphics card. This is NVIDIA's new entry-level graphics card, cards that offer a lot for very little. We'll go in-depth once we receive the actual sample.

As you probably expected this new product range is of course based on the new GeForce 6 Series architecture, yet at entry-level price points. This is actually the 3rd product line to be derived from Series 6. Based on that knowledge, I specifically say the product will be severely "castrated" to place it into different wording. The series 6200 will only have 4 pixel pipelines with 3 vertex units. In a little chart on the next page I'll show you all differences, bare with me here.

Since this is a Series 6 product of course the 6200 will have full DirectX 9 support and yes of course, full Shader Model 3 support. The GPU itself is a NV43, thus a 0.11 micron fabricated product based on the GeForce 6600. Next to that you'll find the key features as explained in our 6600/6800 previews in this product range also, namely CineFX 3.0, Rotated Grid AntiAliasing, UltraShadow II, 16x Anisotropic filtering, ect.

This however is an entry level product so do not expect this to be a Far Cry or Doom 3 uber meister board. In all fairness, we saw the 6600 GT doing a remarkable 75 FPS in 1024x768, so if we cut down performance in half you'd still have a product capable of rendering ~35-40 FPS in Doom 3 at High Quality settings which for the money is not bad at all, in fact that would be impressive. While reading NVIDIA's documentation I am supposed to believe that even Half Life 2 will be playable with acceptable framerates. That remains speculation at this point though. More on that when we have the product actually here in our labs.

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