ION powered Samsung N510 struggles

Doom 3 is ‘barely playable’ on the N510

 Tests have been done on the ION powered Samsung N510 and have run the ‘intensive graphics capable’ ION platform based netbook through some graphics benchmarks.

Unfortunately, they have reported that the ION platform is fantastic for Full HD video and the fancy GUI stuff in Windows such as Aero although the gaming performance is less than exemplary.

Doom 3 was tested with all graphics set to the lowest. Frame rates were as low as 18 fps (frames per second) at 640 x 480 and 16 fps at 1024 x 768. These are virtually unplayable results notwithstanding the minute or so drops that occurred regularly.

I hate to state the obvious but it is a netbook. Whatever fancy graphics chip it’s running, the N510 is still running the standard Intel Atom N270 (1.6 GHz) CPU which is bound to hold any graphics chip back.

Also ran was a 3D Benchmark test and photo-editing software. For more results head over to netbooked.net and select their link to blogee.net as it is a French site.