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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stewis - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
I have setup a netbook at home (Acer aspire one 150 with 1.5gb of ram) as a bittorrent server that uses uTorrent with webui.I believe the Acer uses a Atom 270 and this has more than enough power to run the client, apache, windows 7 and various other bits of software I don't want to leave running on my electricity eating monster of a desktop 24/7.
Omega215D - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
This reference system is what the Mac Mini should have been. Granted it may not look as elegant but the internals more than make up for it.mmntech - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I don't know about that. Though the Mini has a weak GMA 950 IGP, the Core 2 "Merom" is inherently faster than the Atom, even at the same clock speeds. Using the 9400M in the MacMini though would be ideal though. The Ion platform is better suited for the Apple TV. In fact, I remember hearing a rumour that Apple was considering it.Kobaljov - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
"NVIDIA sent a fully configured Ion reference box with 2GB of DDR3-1066 and a dual-core Intel Atom 330 running at 1.6GHz.""Casino Royale was encoded in H.264 and the Ion platform decoded it flawlessly. CPU utilization was high averaging between 40 - 50% on a single-core Atom machine with Hyper Threading enabled"
So, the Ion's CPU is single or dual core?
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - link
Only with the raging red rooster hatred of NVidia can a winning combination on a faster machine be dissed so pathetically.The massive bias of anand comes out in the first sentence : " It would be silly to dislike ion".
Well, since anand so fervently dislikes nvidia, he had hoped to dislike ion, but it would be silly too.
That still doesn't prevent him from using every angle he can imagine to discount the faster platform as 'no good" "not needed" " unneccessary" and on and on and on. Even "not fun" to play games on.
Oh my, when nvidia stiffs him again, and derek, and they drool out some more absolutely ridiculous bias that they would NEVER say concerning nvidia's competitor, neither one will feel any personal reason why they got hammered -again- it will be a clueless blank drooling stare immediately followed by anger and more hatred, if that were actually possible, directed at nvidia... for "being unfair" and "arrogant". lol
It's really hilarious, and sickly, too.
Kobaljov - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Ahh, I see the comment in the article about it, sorry...Crono - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
"NVIDIA called me up to its hotel room..."Dude, not on the first date!
Judguh - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
You beat me to the punch!myjio99 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Super website with a great sharing and amazing stories is ur web.. please keep doing what u do now.. thanks to you, It's a great sharing and really informative.. will keep following ur web. thanks to you and ur great website.In the gaming tests You used a GeForce 9300 motherboard and paired it up with a Celeron 430 to show what a faster CPU could get you with the same graphics used on an Ion platform. You tested with both single and dual channel DDR2-800 memory configurations here, and overclocked the 9300 to the 9400's GPU speeds.
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