ASRock's High-End Vision 3D HTPC Reviewed

The Vision 3D is not meant to be a gaming powerhouse. However, it does turn out to be pretty decent for gaming at 720p resolution with medium graphics settings, as we shall see in this section. With respect to this capability, the performance can be said to be comparable with various notebook gaming solutions. Given the fact that the Core 100 scored poorly in the synthetic benchmarks, we will not be considering it in this section.

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In all the above graphs, low and medium settings correspond to games run at 1366x768, while the high setting corresponds to a resolution of 1600x900. Despite the fact that these are not resolutions one would run at in a HTPC usually, I chose to present the benchmarks for these because our notebook reviews use these resolutions. With 30 fps providing barely playable performance, we find that the Vision 3D is certainly not capable of 1080p gaming at high settings. However, 720p gaming at medium settings should be a decent experience for most of the current games.

3D gaming over HDMI 1.4a onto 3D TVs is also possible on the system. This is enabled by the nVidia 3DTV Play software which comes bundled in the accompanying CD. On 3D capable monitors, the dual link DVI port can be used for the same purpose (similar to what could be done with the older 3D capable nVidia graphics cards).

The Vision 3D also has AiWi enabled. An iPhone or iPod can be used as a motion sensing device similar to the Wii remote. We covered this aspect in a little bit of detail in the Core 100 review, and there is nothing much to add here except for the fact that gaming experience is much smoother thanks to the more powerful CPU and GPU. However, ASRock loses some points for not porting the app over to Android yet, contrary to what they had promised earlier during the Core 100 review. In any case, iDevice owners can enjoy this feature without issues.