Acer's Aspire One 532g netbook - the first on the market to feature Nvidia's Ion 2 graphics hardware - has been run through its paces, and initial indications are that its performance is sadly lacking.
As reported in a video over on Netbook News, the latest Aspire One netbook is designed to offer a combination of excellent battery life and solid 3D performance thanks to Nvidia's Optimus technology, which allows the device to switch between low-power Intel graphics and the meatier Nvidia G310M processor on demand. While sound in practice, the overall experience is apparently not that great.
Running 3D Mark 03 on the device, Netbook News was able to get a score of 3,049 3DMarks with the Nvidia chip enabled - a score that Netbook Choice highlights as being significantly lower than they were able to get from rival Samsung's N510 netbook, which scored a more impressive 3,593 3DMarks despite using the last-generation Ion LE graphics chipset.
While the initial performance might be somewhat underwhelming, the fact remains that the Ion 2 platform promises a significant performance boost - which begs the question of why that increase in performance wasn't being seen during the benchmark. Whether it's representative of an issue with the platform, or whether the unit was running pre-release drivers that valued stability over performance, is currently unknown.
Are the benchmark scores putting you off the idea of making your next netbook an Ion 2 unit, or are you going to want to see scores from an actual release unit before making your mind up? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
As reported in a video over on Netbook News, the latest Aspire One netbook is designed to offer a combination of excellent battery life and solid 3D performance thanks to Nvidia's Optimus technology, which allows the device to switch between low-power Intel graphics and the meatier Nvidia G310M processor on demand. While sound in practice, the overall experience is apparently not that great.
Running 3D Mark 03 on the device, Netbook News was able to get a score of 3,049 3DMarks with the Nvidia chip enabled - a score that Netbook Choice highlights as being significantly lower than they were able to get from rival Samsung's N510 netbook, which scored a more impressive 3,593 3DMarks despite using the last-generation Ion LE graphics chipset.
While the initial performance might be somewhat underwhelming, the fact remains that the Ion 2 platform promises a significant performance boost - which begs the question of why that increase in performance wasn't being seen during the benchmark. Whether it's representative of an issue with the platform, or whether the unit was running pre-release drivers that valued stability over performance, is currently unknown.
Are the benchmark scores putting you off the idea of making your next netbook an Ion 2 unit, or are you going to want to see scores from an actual release unit before making your mind up? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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