NVIDIA ION 2 vs NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI

NVIDIA ION 2

The Nvidia ION 2 (GT218-ION-A3 / GT218-ILV-A3) is a dedicated graphics card for the new Pinetrail Atom CPUs (e.g., N450, D510, D410 announced Dec 2009) Generation. The ION2 is based on the GT218 chip (GeForce 305M, 310M) with dedicated memory (compared to the old ION that was a chipset graphics card). Because of the limitations of the Pinetrail chipset, it can only be connected with PCIe 1x. Therefore, the performance of the chip is slower than a similar GeForce G210M e.g.

The ION 2 comes in three versions, that differ in core speed and shader cores.

10" Netbook ION

The ION chip in 10" netbooks with Pinetrail Atoms offers only 8 shader cores and a clock rate of 405 MHz. According to Nvidia the performance should still be similar to the first generation of ION. The power consumption of 6 Watt is rather low, and therefore fully suited for small netbooks.

12" Netbook ION

The 12" version features all 16 cores of the GT218 chip and is clocked at 475 MHz. The performance should be above the old ION platform.

Desktop & Netbook ION

The desktop version is clocked even higher at 535 MHz as no power restrictions have to be met.

First benchmarks by netbooknews.de on a pre-sample of the Acer Aspire 532g with the 8-shader-core version resulted in about 3000 points in 3DMark03. That would be noticeably slower than a ION 1 netbook. The relative low result can be explained by the early sample and the PCIe 1x bus. Still, compared to a GMA 3150 the performance is a lot better. 

As the integrated GMA 3150 graphics in the Atom CPU is quite limited (slow 3D performance, no HD video acceleration, no digital monitor output), the ION 2 is intended to adress these weak points. It offers a better 3D performance, (digital) monitor outputs (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, and VGA), video acceleration with PureVideo HD (since Flash 10.1 also for Internet Videos in HD) and CUDA for using the computing power of the GPU.

The netbook ION 2 versions also supports Optimus to automatically switch between the dedicated (ION) and integrated (GMA 3150) graphics card. Therefore the battery runtime without GPU load should be equal to a non ION netbook. The HDMI port however always triggers the use of the ION card, as the port cant be used with the GMA 3150.

The power consumption of 6-12 Watt TDP is quite high for an Atom system, but the ION 2 should be switchable (with the integrated GMA 3150) which still can lead to high battery runtimes.

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI

Two NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphic cards in SLI combination grant highest performances coupled with highest current consumption. So, the performance is similar to the top DirectX 9 desktop graphic cards (without SLI in desktop).

The 7950 GTX is the top graphic card of the series 7000 from NVIDIA for laptops. It offered at the time of presentation a high performance to play all DirectX 9 games in high resolutions and details. Especially, regarding Antialiasing and Anisotrop filters the combined cards are clearly better than single cards. They are used for big and heavy laptops (because of the heat creation, at moment only in a 19" notebook). The card combination was succeeded by the 8800M GTX SLI card combination.

Due to the fact, that the SLI combination renders each frame on a different graphics card, the frametimes between two frames may differ. Therefore, the game at 30fps may stutter a bit, the so called micro stuttering.