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Ion Platform For Atom Tested With Games, HD Video

Posted by timothy on from the setting-the-bar-moderately-high dept.

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia has already pulled the curtain off its Ion platform, which couples GeForce 9400 integrated graphics with Intel's Atom processor. But how does it perform? The Tech Report has taken the tiny Ion reference system for a spin in games and video decoding to see if the GeForce GPU really helps. The verdict? 1080p playback is actually smooth, and the whole system only draws 25W during playback. Fast-paced action games are another story—Half-Life 2, Quake Wars, and Call of Duty 4 are all choppy with a single Atom core and single-channel RAM, although they do run. TR concludes that Ion is nevertheless a clear improvement over Intel's 945G chipset, especially since Nvidia doesn't expect Ion-based Atom systems to cost significantly more than all-Intel ones." Update: 02/04 09:14 GMT by T : HotHardware is one of the several other sites offering some performance benchmark numbers on the new chipset.

23 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. But the real question is- by Gizzmonic · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does the Atom processor make the Internet faster? Because if not, I'm going back to a P4!

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    1. Re:But the real question is- by frieko · · Score: 3, Informative

      If I may take a moment to be a smartass: Assuming your P4 has a 25 watt power supply, the internet is about infinity times faster.

  2. nVidia is doomed. by tjstork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hate to say it because they do good work, but I think nVidia is ultimately doomed as it is today. Everyone rips Intel's integrated 3d graphics but they just keep getting better every year. Although AMD should have bought nVidia instead of ATI, they do own ATI, and so have a pretty good graphics system on their own. Eventually, both AMD and Intel are going to wind up with 3d calculations on the die in some fashion, and that's going to leave nVidia for what?

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    1. Re:nVidia is doomed. by Bearhouse · · Score: 3, Informative

      Insightful. If one looks at the post here today:

      http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/02/2344208

      About the new Acer with Intel's highly-integrated N280/GN40 chipset, you've got to wonder about the long-term viability of nVidia.

    2. Re:nVidia is doomed. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree that Nvidia has a good slice of life left; but do remember: Nvidia(as well as ATI) got into high-performance workstation stuff, and undercut the super esoteric stuff, in large part because they could amortize much of the R&D cost over huge numbers of consumer parts. There are niches were totally custom esoteric high end stuff can survive, even prosper; but trying to survive exclusively on high end stuff is an ugly business.

      The history of computing is littered with the corpses of high end outfits who were devoured by their cheap junk competitor's gradually improving parts, and rapidly improving price/performance ratio.

    3. Re:nVidia is doomed. by Hogwash+McFly · · Score: 3, Funny

      and that's going to leave nVidia for what?

      Asking for a bailout?

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    4. Re:nVidia is doomed. by Joe+U · · Score: 3, Insightful

      nVidia/ATI will end up going the way of Creative. It used to be that to get any sort of decent sound you were required to buy a PCI sound card. I'm out of the hard-core gaming scene, but I don't know anyone that uses anything but integrated sound. When I can get 7.1 sound from my motherboard, why would I consider buying something else?

      Creative seriously fucked up the sound card market to try and corner it and wound up destroying audio on the PC. Most of the serious competition got bought up or put out of business by Creative's 'win by any means necessary' plan.

    5. Re:nVidia is doomed. by Chabo · · Score: 2, Informative

      According to Anandtech, currently Creative still has the best game compatibility, because the game devs write to their cards, but Asus' Xonar line has better sound quality, and nearly the same level of game compatibility. I know if I were to build a new machine I'd take their advice on that, what with Creative's driver troubles, especially on x86-64.

      http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3497&p=5

      Based on Valve's stats, it looks like only about 3.5% of Steam users have an X-Fi card. I do know of a large portion of people who were weary of the X-Fi series though, and kept buying Audigys, and people like me who kept their "Creative Live!" cards, which are likely a good portion of that 33% with "other" sound devices.

      GP is right though; most people are perfectly happy with onboard sound. This is especially true in the laptop market, which last I heard was now well over 50% of total computer sales.

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    6. Re:nVidia is doomed. by ogdenk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Raster rendering used to be extremely slow as well before much R&D money was pumped into making cheap hardware with enough oompf to do it well on affordable computers.

      I had a PowerVR2-based card back in 1996 and it struggled with Quake 2 at 512x384 in a K6 233. Software rendering almost as fast. The 3DFX Voodoo1 was less than impressive as well.

      Give it time, raytracing hardware will become viable eventually.

  3. What about power consumption? by hattig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How does the ION chipset compare in power consumption with the mobile 945 used in netbooks (the 6W TDP one, not the 20W+ TDP desktop variant that's a total joke).

    25W for CPU, Chipset, HD, Memory, motherboard doesn't seem as low as it could be.

    Still, if they can get 8 hours out of a 6 cell battery in a netbook with it, great. It's a far far far more advanced chipset than the Intel crud.

  4. Valve games by Chabo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well of course Half Life 2 is choppy on the platform -- the Source engine is very CPU-intensive. Almost every system is going to be CPU-bound with Valve games, unless you happen to be running a Core i7 with an entry-level video card, at 1920x1200. As for the other games, you're still running on integrated graphics, and there's only so much you can do before you need a separate card.

    Disclaimer: I work for Intel, but I've been a fan of Valve's games for much longer than that.

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  5. A reasonable start by abigsmurf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Games performance isn't really the issue for these. These things aren't designed for games.

    What these are best used for are Media Centre setups. However it doesn't play all 1080p content smoothly which is a major issue. There are plenty of options for this kind of thing, the Popcorn hour, the WD HDTV box. Those are good to a point but fall down on format support, especially mkv which doesn't have full subtitle and codec support on either.

    The current best option is an energy efficient Athlon based setup. These cost about $75-$100 more than an atom system and use a bit more power but they'll play back any video you throw at them without dropping any frames.

    Maybe with a dual core atom and using dual core optimised codecs this will reach the goal of never having to notice a dropped frame, regardless of format and bit rate but this atom solution still isn't the Media center beast it could be.

    1. Re:A reasonable start by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Totally agree. who is going to be playing Half Life 2 on a 8" or 10" screen? =P

      Certainly, but looking towards platforms such as PSP, Nintendo DS and the iPhone, we can see that there is a market for games taking advantage of small format screens. While Half Life 2 won't be targeted at these platforms, there are already FPS games for some of these platforms, though then again we are more likely to see a Nvidia + ARM combination, than a Nvida + x86 combination, simply because of battery limitations.

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  6. Re:Damn by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looks like I didn't wait long enough to get the netbook.

    You can never wait too long to get the ultimate configuration, but there is only so long you can wait to have something to use.

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  7. Re:Damn by Chabo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Right. The only way you can really be screwed by new hardware coming out is if you buy right before a price reduction. If you pay attention to the market, you pretty much know when those are going to happen. Athlon X2 price drop when Conroe was released, Penryn price drop when Phenom II was released, etc.

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  8. I'd buy some. by Big+Boss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    With recent developments in VDPAU, the HD capable GPU acceleration for Linux, I could use this board. The only thing I would change is to make it wider and move all the ports to the back. Include an LCD or VFD if you want to get fancy, and and IR receiver on the front. Perfect MythTV frontend machine. I would like the dual-channel RAM though, to help with 1080i playback.

    Put it in a nice small case like those used for modern DVD players, and they have a winner.

    1. Re:I'd buy some. by QuasiEvil · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My first thought exactly - gimme, gimme, gimme, need a new Myth frontend. Let's see - low power, good Linux-supported decompression acceleration, and has an HDMI port. This is exactly what I've been waiting on.

  9. 25 Watts? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2, Informative
    25 watts during playback? Huh? This is more than twice what my current netbook with Intel graphics uses. It generally runs less than 11 watts, and I can get it to a bit less than 9 with some tweaking. I don't suppose anyone's seriously proposing an Atom platform that pulls 25 watts during playback.

    Bruce

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    1. Re:25 Watts? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But Intel graphics can't do 1080p

      Perhaps because there isn't optimized MPEG playback code for that chipset?

      Part of the problem here is that on the desktop, Intel's vendors don't want great Intel graphics, they want to be able to sell up to an external display card. So, it's only the laptop platform that could drive an improvement in Intel graphics.

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      Bruce Perens.
  10. They only tested the single core CPU...? by AllynM · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A review of the ION platform with a dual core Atom 330 is here:

    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=663

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  11. My new mythtv frontends!!!! by jhfry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I see this being the hot new frontend for mythtv. With VDPAU supported for HD decoding, fanless/quiet fan, atom processor, a bit of ram, and a SD card for storage I could make one hell of a nice tiny front end.

    I want one now!

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  12. Re:Damn by Nursie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Serious question: what does that leave?"

    Email.
    Slashdot.
    Flashing Neo Freerunner with stuff.
    Using it as a terminal into my servers for maintenance tasks.
    Music & Movies (on the plane or sometimes hooked up to a big LCD)

    Err...

    Taking places I wouldn't take a decent laptop. Or places I wouldn't think to take a normal one, but it's small enough to throw in the bag.
    Seeing something on tv and wanting to look it up on wikipedia NOW and every other computer is out of reach and takes ages to boot...

    I don't know if it's for everyone, but I use it all the time. To the extent I feared I'd stop using my vaio completely for a while. Then I remembered that I occasionally type letters or play games. Or do the odd bit of crypto-related programming.

  13. Re:Intel will hate it. by forkazoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Intel is simply going to put more of the functionality of GPUs into its CPUs. Meanwhile they are talking about a future with "thousands of cores" in the computers of mainstream users.

    Actually, AMD is out front on putting GPU functionality into CPU's with the "fusion" platform. Intel is taking the long way around with Larrabee and putting X86 into the GPU. Go figure. Anyhow, the end result will be to reduce chip counts and take advantage of the high number of transistors that can cheaply be put on a single chip and integrate as much as practical.

    Personally, I'm surprised we haven't seen more in the way of SOC's marketed at the desktop market yet. I'm sure it'll come, and you'll just get a motherboard with PCIe slots, DIMM slots, and a CPU socket, but no chipset or anything soldered on.