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.
The NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX is top of the mobile graphic cards line from NVIDIA (of the 7000 series) and successor of the 7900 GTX graphics card. It enables the user to play all games from 2006 fluently in the highest resolutions and options. As a consequence, the heat is correspondingly high. Therefore it can be used only in DTR laptops (17"). At moment, there is nothing better for gamers (except the SLI version with 2 cards).
The performance can be compared partially even with the Desktop 7950 GT video cards (partially a bit better, according NVIDIA). Therefore, the Geforce Go 7950 GTX is able to display actual games like F.E.A.R., Company of Heroes, or Call of Duty 2 fluently in high details and high resolutions.
The chip also features the PureVideo Technology but has less features as the PureVideo engine in the current 8600M GT chip. > Comparison of PureVideo features
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX → 336%n=5
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.