Anti-aliasing on the 6200TC – HL2 Test
By NVIDIA’s own account, there were some parts of the 6200 core that were removed in order to decrease die size, but at the expense of Anti-Aliasing performance. Both color and Z-compression (which help with AA) are missing in hardware from the 6200TC and instead depend on the Forceware drivers for help. These quick tests show the difference between the 32 MB 6200TC running HL2 in 0xAA mode and 2xAA mode, just to see what performance gaps we get.
At 800×600 we have a 42% drop in average frame rate, and at 1024×768 we have a 44% drop. Both minimum and max frame rates take similar hits in performance, so in fact we can see that the AA performance on these parts aren’t scaling like 6800 or even 6600 cores.
