I never had a Geforce 6200 but i would guess it should be able to play videos at 480p just fine, no?
Maybe even 720p on the VLC player or MediaPlayer Classic? Or am i being too optimist about this? 😀

F2bnp wrote:

... hopefully it has DDR2 memory and not plain DDR.

Why? I don't know 6200 DDR2 card that would have higher clocks.

rick6 wrote:

I never had a Geforce 6200 but i would guess it should be able to play videos at 480p just fine, no?
Maybe even 720p on the VLC player or MediaPlayer Classic? Or am i being too optimist about this? 😀

GeForce 6200, and the FX series before it, do not accelerate h.264 or VC-1 like modern graphics cards (and will not even touch things like Flash GPU). Some of the GeForce 6/7 series have limited h.264 and VC-1 "assist" (some models can perform IDCT), and they all generally have the same VPE package out of the GeForce FX series, which will provide MPEG-2 decoding assuming the application supports PureVideo (and you remember to enable the feature). The decode "assist" feature still requires a fairly robust CPU though, as the GPU isn't able to do end-to-end decoding (and the CPU is left doing a lot of the work - G84 was the first nVidia chip to do full h.264, and G98 for VC-1). The AGP variants of the GeForce 6 do not support this h.264/VC-1 assist functionality (which was something of a scandal in its day), but I'm not sure if this also applies to the PCI 6200 or not (and the PCI 6200 isn't listed on the PureVideo support matrix). It should still support VPE, like the GeForce FX, which will provide MPEG decoding support for DVD playback.

Talking about resolution is far too broad/simplistic here - "play videos at 480p" doesn't tell us a whole lot. If you mean DVDs, yes it should do that just fine (if it doesn't already). However if you mean YouTube - the GeForce FX, 6200, whatever will be no different than the i815's IGP in that respect, because it's not able to contribute anything to the decoder.

Putas wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

... hopefully it has DDR2 memory and not plain DDR.

Why? I don't know 6200 DDR2 card that would have higher clocks.

I'm not sure I understand. The 6200 came in a lot of variants, like the 6200A and the Turbocache. AFAIK both used DDR and were 64bit cards.
The original 6200 is a 128bit card with DDR2 VRAM.

Also, like obobskivich said, these cards will play DVDs just fine, but they will never help with Youtube and such. I remember back in ~2009-2010 using a similar machine online and Youtube played nicely for the most part, but it has gotten much worse in the years that followed.

F2bnp wrote:

Also, like obobskivich said, these cards will play DVDs just fine, but they will never help with Youtube and such. I remember back in ~2009-2010 using a similar machine online and Youtube played nicely for the most part, but it has gotten much worse in the years that followed.

The recent improvements to Chrome's HTML5 implementation makes YouTube play much nicer on older machines. It's certainly better than Flash now.

I was watching EEVblog on YT the other day and I was very surprised that my 3GHz dual-core S939 system could handle the 1080p/50 stream on the CPU alone (original G80 video card, so no H264 acceleration).

Just two months ago the same system couldn't even handle 720p at the higher 50/60p frame rates, so they've really boosted efficiency recently. They probably had to, with the recent announcement of 4k/60 streaming on YouTube.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

The recent improvements to Chrome's HTML5 implementation makes YouTube play much nicer on older machines. It's certainly better […]
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F2bnp wrote:

Also, like obobskivich said, these cards will play DVDs just fine, but they will never help with Youtube and such. I remember back in ~2009-2010 using a similar machine online and Youtube played nicely for the most part, but it has gotten much worse in the years that followed.

The recent improvements to Chrome's HTML5 implementation makes YouTube play much nicer on older machines. It's certainly better than Flash now.

I was watching EEVblog on YT the other day and I was very surprised that my 3GHz dual-core S939 system could handle the 1080p/50 stream on the CPU alone (original G80 video card, so no H264 acceleration).

Just two months ago the same system couldn't even handle 720p at the higher 50/60p frame rates, so they've really boosted efficiency recently. They probably had to, with the recent announcement of 4k/60 streaming on YouTube.

Wow, I should try that out!

leileilol wrote:

Also Radeon doesn't do legacy stuff at all. Not even the 7200.

It is possible to enable D3D5 table fog with a registry entry. I've done it in the distant past. It's annoying that they didn't just support it officially though. I still wouldn't pick a Radeon for, well, any old games. 8500's AA modes are interesting curiosities however....

F2bnp wrote:

Putas wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

... hopefully it has DDR2 memory and not plain DDR.

Why? I don't know 6200 DDR2 card that would have higher clocks.

I'm not sure I understand. The 6200 came in a lot of variants, like the 6200A and the Turbocache. AFAIK both used DDR and were 64bit cards.
The original 6200 is a 128bit card with DDR2 VRAM.

The memory type was not specified for any of them, DDR2 has no advantages.

rick6 wrote:

I never had a Geforce 6200 but i would guess it should be able to play videos at 480p just fine, no?
Maybe even 720p on the VLC player or MediaPlayer Classic? Or am i being too optimist about this? 😀

You need at least P4 2GHz / Pentium M 1.4GHz / AXP 2000+ / Dual PIII 900 MHz for smooth H264 720p video decoding.
I've tested this some time ago with GF 7800 GS AGP and MPCHC. I'm not sure however whether any PCI VGA is fast enough to play a 720p video. PCI bandwith may be too low to feed the data to the GPU.