Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Gaming Performance
The gaming performance of Intel’s basic Atom platform is a joke. I’ll put aside debates of whether or not you would want to game on an Atom for a moment. World of Warcraft does a great job of straddling the line between casual and hardcore gaming and thus makes a good candidate for looking at gaming performance of Ion vs. Intel’s standard Atom platform.
I tested by running through a small outdoor section at 800 x 600 (24-bit color, no AA) using WoW’s built in “Good” visual quality settings. This is the same chart from the Pentium 4 section but I'm repeating it here so you have something to look at while we discuss the gaming potential of Ion:
The Ion platform managed just under 18 fps, which wasn’t incredibly smooth to play on but it was close. If I dropped the settings even lower I could easily get a smooth experience. The Intel D945GCLF2 managed a whopping 3 fps. I didn’t even bother benchmarking the single core version; I’m not that fond of single digits.
Most modern FPS games will show worse performance than what we just saw under WoW. Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead will give you under 7 fps for Zotac’s Ion platform, but other, more mainstream titles will perform similarly if not better.
I still maintain that the Atom CPU is not fast enough for a good gaming experience on far too many modern titles, but to NVIDIA’s credit, the Ion platform does make it fast enough in games that it otherwise wouldn’t be.
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bobvodka - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
While I know it's only at the RC stage, it might be intresting to see how this plays with Win7, if only as a nod to the future and with regards to how it performs against XPlemon8h8ead - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Thanks for a good job in optimizing control over the environment. It is not easy to create apples-to-apples tests.I would have been interested in seeing the same H/W configurations running one of the popular Linux distros (E.g. Ubuntu). It has been my observation that the Linux kernel multithreads more efficiently than Windows but those were purely compute-bound applications that I was comparing and the benchmarks are 8 years old on very dated H/W platforms (obsolete). I realize that both Windows and Linux kernels have improved vastly since then.
Is your HTPC speced out here anywhere? Just curious.
sysdump - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I want to see HD H264 content decoded using CUDA! To see if it can handle non DXVA compatible videos.mvrx - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I've been using an Atom 330 system as a DD-WRT router.. cost me only $150 and is probably 15x faster than any Dlink or linksys on the market.. People really need to pay attention to this possibility.mindless1 - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Presumably you're comparing against Dlink and Linksys consumer grade routers, that are meant for light use. In such a scenario why would it need to be 15X faster and had you done latency tests that quantify the difference? Checking latency on a router running DD-WRT I find the router latency insignificant compared to the rest of the nodes along a typical connection, and that when the router is even doing QOS concurrent to P2P transfers.I'd think a board like this to be quite overkill for mere routing, it might be nice though to have a few more features possible like DNS caching, web proxy, advanced firewall rules, web/mail server.
JoKeRr - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
For $80 with 3 SATA ports and add in some ram and 3 hard disks, this will make a decent NAS file server with linux installed.I use a PS3 in the living room, it used to be a old mac mini. Right now I definitely miss the iPhone remote with iTune in the mac mini. PS3 is great for movies, but for not so with web content. I use PS3 media server to stream movies from my PC to the PS3, it also performs transcoding on the content that PS3 doesn't recognize (mkv). My desktop is P4 3.0C overclocked to 3.5GHz, and it has no problem transcoding mkv movies in 720p resolution (max bit rate I saw was around 15Mbps), I would really like to know how the dual core atom performs on the transcoding front with PS3 media server. If it works well, it will be a very nice compliment to the PS3 system.
Thank you!
NullSubroutine - Saturday, May 16, 2009 - link
I thought I'd like to throw out that that with MKV files you can mux them (like with tsMuxer) to MT2S files which can then be renamed to MP4 to play on PS3.Muxing takes less than a minute usually and doesn't convert the video just takes it out of the MKV container file.
It may be easier to do this with your files than have them transcode on the fly.
ViRGE - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
If only it had component out. The HDMI port is nice, but I had a RP-CRT; I'd love to replace my HTPC box with something like this, but the lack of component out is a killer.moozoo - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I believe the ION platform supports CUDA.Please run some CUDA benchmarks and those H264 video encodings using BadaBOOM on this motherboard.
The ION chipset (MCP79) has very low latency between the GPU and the main memory. This makes it possible to perform audio functions on the GPU.
See http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=92290">http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=92290
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
From the conclusion:"I did try some CUDA applications on the Zotac Ion board and they were definitely faster than using the CPU alone. While our x264 test managed around 12 fps on the Zotac Ion, using Badaboom I was able to encode at just under 20 fps."