Nvidia Ion Archive

Nvidia Ion 2 delayed a few months

By
M@
Published: December 17, 2009Tags: ,
Nvidia Ion 2 delayed a few months

We were all awaiting the launch of Nvidia’s next-gen Ion platform at CES on Jan 15th. Well it will still be showcased but the official launch has been moved back until sometime in the first quarter 2010. The big vendors (Asus, MSI, Lenovo and HP) are said to be responsible for the delay due to strong sales of the current Ion models.

As we all know the N450 and N470 Pinetrail processors coming in Jan will be much faster than the current setup of the N280 + GMA graphics. Well the next generation Ion platform will be 5 to 10 times faster than the Pinetrail. This will lead to netbooks with the abilities of full laptops, and with only slightly shorter battery lives.

Just like the HP Mini 311 blew all other netbooks out of the water with its Ion graphics and DDR3 RAM, we’ll look forward to the first netbooks featuring the next-generation Ion platform to do the same to the Pinetrail platform, and there should be plenty of previews at CES 2010 in January.

via Fudzilla

Asus Eee PC 1201N hands on

By
M@
Published: November 25, 2009Tags: ,
Asus Eee PC 1201N hands on

Lars from Mobile and notebook attended an Nvidia launch event in Taiwan that featured the much anticipated Asus Eee PC 1201N.

The 1201N has some impressive features, including a 12.1″ screen and a dual core Atom N330 processor. All of this in combination with the Nvidia Ion chipset makes for one bad netbook.

It has all of the usual goodies including:

  • 250GB hd
  • 2GB 800MHz RAM
  • 802.11 b/g/n
  • HDMI out
  • 5 hour battery

Right now the netbook is going to retail at $619 which is a little high for the netbook crowd, but the price should come down over time.

via mobile and notebook.com

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta performance tests

By
M@
Published: November 17, 2009Tags: ,
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta performance tests

As you know from our earlier article Flash player 10.1 beta was released today and laptopmag.com has already put it through a few performance tests. As you’ll see in the chart below, what was a slideshow now becomes watchable. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better.

Frame Rates Compared: Flash 10.1 vs. Flash 10 on HP Mini 311

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An episode of “Heroes”  (”Once Upon a Time in Texas”) streamed with an average framerate of 23 fps. When we played the same clip on a Mini 311 with the older Flash player, we saw just 12 fps.

We also saw marked improvement when we tried Flash 10.1 on the Acer Aspire 1810T, a CULV system with integrated graphics. This 11.6-inch notebook features a 1.3-GHz Intel Pentium SU7300 CPU, and Intel GMA4500MHD graphics, so while it started out at a higher spot than the Mini 311, the two ended up with roughly the same frame rates. Below is a chart showing the 1810T’s framerates before and after installing Flash 10.1.

Frame Rates Compared: Flash 10.1 vs. Flash 10 on Acer 1810t

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So if you are in the market for a new netbook and want smooth HD flash video you might want to checkout ones with either Ion or Intel 4500HD graphics. A good example of each is the HP mini 311 with Ion graphics, and the Acer 1410 with Intel.

Enable DirectX 10 on Nvidia Ion LE

By
M@
Published: October 29, 2009Tags:
Enable DirectX 10 on Nvidia Ion LE

The NVIDIA ION platform combines a low power Intel Atom processor with high performance NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics to enable low power computers to handle HD video, some modern video games, and other tasks that can take advantage of the graphics processor. But there are two versions of the ION platform: ION and ION LE. The only real difference that I’m aware of is that NVDIA ION supports DirectX 10 while ION LE does not.

For the most part, machines that have been shipping with Windows XP have come with ION LE, which makes sense since Windows XP doesn’t support DirectX 10 anyway. But if you want to upgrade to Windows Vista or 7, you might want to enable DirectX 10… and it turns out it’s not as hard you might think to do that.

MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner took a look at the drivers for NVIDIA ION LE that are available from HP’s web site and found that they can only be installed if your system has the device ID 0876, which corresponds with ION. Machines with NVIDIA ION LE have a device ID of 087F. So he added 087F to the INF  and he was able to install the drivers for NVIDIA ION… which effectively upgraded his HP Mini 311 from ION LE to full NVIDIA ION graphics.

The end result? His Windows Experience Index score for gaming graphics jumped from 3.9 to 5.4. He’s also noticed a performance boost when playing games that use DirectX 9, although he had to manually tell some games to use DX9 instead of DX10 because they were slower under DX10.

Oh, and in case you don’t want to fidget with the drivers yourself, runawayprisoner says he’ll be uploading the modified driver soon, so stay tuned to the forum thread for more details. via Lilliputing.