NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 3, 2009 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Gaming Performance: The Other Advantage
The GeForce 9400M that is spec’d for NVIDIA’s Ion platform is the same 9400M used in full sized notebooks. It’s a 16 SP core running at 550MHz with a 1.4GHz shader clock. While you can’t game on a standard Atom system, it is possible to do so on an Ion machine.
Gaming performance is no contest. This is truly the advantage of Ion. At the lowest possible quality settings in World of Warcraft the Atom/945G platform delivered an average of 7 frames per second in our test. Hardly playable.
Ion managed a smooth 35 fps. While it’s not fast enough where you can go crazy with the detail settings, it is possible to get your WoW fix on an Ion based netbook while it isn’t on a standard netbook configuration. Note that simply moving to a low end Celeron improves performance considerably. Move to a Celeron and use two channels of DDR2 memory and you get another performance boost.
Fallout 3 is an even more clear-cut victory. We still have to run at the lowest quality settings to even get something playable, but at least it can run. On the 945G based Atom board Fallout 3 wouldn’t even run without crashing.
The Ion platform actually has an advantage here: it's got more memory bandwidth. I have to populate two DDR2 DIMM slots on the Celeron board in order to actually show a performance advantage over Ion.
Under World of Warcraft the Ion was only 5x the speed of Intel’s Atom/945G. Left 4 Dead however proves to be more GPU dependent and runs at nearly 10x the speed on Ion as it does on Intel’s 945G. While I wouldn’t want to play Left 4 Dead on any Atom machine, it’s at least remotely possible on an Ion.
Left 4 Dead is actually slightly faster on Ion than on our Celeron 430 testbed. I suspect this (and the Fallout 3 behavior) is due to the Celeron 430 being a single-core, single threaded processor while the dual core Atom in the Ion can work on four threads at once.
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IntelUser2000 - Friday, February 6, 2009 - link
You might want to know that the version of 945 used on the Netbooks is 945GSE. It is a very low power part. It's TDP spec is only 5.5W.Don't be thinking because its 0.13u its a high power part. Chipset TDP of the 65nm 4-series mobile chipsets are higher than 0.13u 945's.
And the 2.5W Atom used on the EEEPCs, the N270s are meant for "Netbooks". The Atom 230's which are meant for "Nettops" are 4W, and 330 is a dual core version of it.
It's 4W vs. 8W.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Remember the whole CMOS vs. GTL bus stuff. AND, the US15 has NO SATA on it. Kinda useless for the desktop.Of course the laptop variants will pull less power than the desktop variants, but the desktop parts should be cheaper.
Btw, with Zotac set to release an Intel 9300 Wifi mini-ITX board, why bother with Ion on the desktop? The current 7100 Zotac ITX board + 430 Celeron costs around $20 more than the dual core Intel Atom board, and the chipset on it runs at the same temps, 60c (that is, I replaced mine with a Zalman blue heatsink). It also gives you a pci-e x1 slot, DVI, better graphics, two slots for ram, and the fan on the Celeron is much quieter and unlike the fan on the Intel 945 chipsets, doesn't die (check out newegg.com for reviews of people 2 months down the road).
I've tested that board and it rocks. You do give up s video and gigabit eth, but the new 9300 board will fix all that with both DVI and HDMI, and will have a x16 pci-e slot.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, I replaced the crappy useless heatsink fan combo on the Intel board. The Zotac board went as high as 90c while playing Portal, and didn't miss a beat.sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, maybe that whole no SATA thing was the GN40...Necrosaro420 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I dont get it, what is this?mobilecomputing - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
Its a graphics chipset that processes video so the main CPU doesnt have to as much cos the piddly little Atom processors cant take the heat. Not even the new ones http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/intel-atom-n280...">http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/inte...maller-c...Slash3 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Obviously, it is a watermelon.JTBM - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I think for Ion it would great to see Bittorrent results. For example can it run Vuze (Azeorus)?mrsmegz - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Bitorrent clients would run extremely well on this machine even if it was clocked at 800mhz. Your bottleneck here is in your internet connection. Of course you could be planning to hide one of these tiny boxes under a floor tile in a server room at work.ssj4Gogeta - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Azureus is a quite heavy application compared to other clients.