ASUS EeePC 1215N: Bringing NG-ION to the 1201

ASUS Eee PC 1215N Gaming Performance

So, here we are with Next-Gen ION. The graphics chip identifies itself as ION, but it’s just an underclocked version of the NVIDIA G 210M/310M dGPU that was in some of our favorites like the UL80Vt. The GT 218 core has two versions for NG-ION netbooks, one for 10” platforms with 8 CUDA cores and one for larger platforms with the full 16 CUDA cores. The 1215N has all 16 SPs, so it’s going to be faster than the new 1015PN that has the Atom N550 and the 8 SP NG-ION chip.

Our gaming test suite is completely different now than it was when we tested the Eee PC 1201, so we can’t directly compare the two, but the 1215N is similar in that it gets blown out by its larger brethen, even though they are also running the same basic GT 218 core. Obviously, the G 210M and G 310M are clocked higher, but it’s still a sizeable difference. The ASUS U35 outdoes the 1215N by roughly a factor of two or three, except in STALKER and ME2. In our Call of Pripyat test, the NG-ION doesn’t actually have the ability to run the benchmark with anything other than static object lighting, so it’s not really on the same page as the other results. I re-ran the UL80Jt with the same settings just for comparison’s sake and got 96.1 fps, so again roughly double the 1215N. ME2 tends to be less CPU bound than some of the other benchmarks in our suite, so the drop in performance there is probably equally related to the lower GPU clock speed as it is the CPU bottleneck. Either way though, it’s simply not possible to run native resolution games at playable levels, even with bare minimum settings. To get playable framerates on most modern games, you will need to turn the resolution down to 1024x600 or so and just scale up to fullscreen.

But let’s stop comparing it to dedicated graphics cards—how does it do against some of the better integrated solutions? The NVIDIA 320M isn’t even a comparison worth talking about, since it’s about two times faster than the 310M. A bright spot for the NG-ION platform is that it outperforms the current AMD integrated graphics platforms in most of the tests, but again, given the AMD HD 6250 and HD 6310 (Ontario and Zacate, respectively) on the horizon, there’s going to be pressure on NVIDIA to boost the performance of their low end graphics solutions.