Any old Ion?

The Nvidia ion GPU was released a few years back to cater for the low power netbook market as a substantial upgrade for the anemic Intel GMA950 (or 945gm as it is better known to us) that shipped as the integrated graphics processor in the first Atoms. Those made quite nice machines with long runtimes, a touch on the slow side compared to the full grown laptops, but actually quite comparable to the current generation of premium tablets many years later. People still use these, and I get the occasional request to see how well they perform everytime Nvidia releases a new driver. So lets take a look:

In nearly every test there is a small improvement, at around 2-3%. But for the paintball HTML5 demo, they have managed to fix some form of resource starvation and have been able to accelerate it, giving an order of magnitude speed increase. Strangely, the nvidia driver fares worse on average than the nouveau driver, despite it having substantially better performance in several cases. This is because the nouveau driver is, at least, consistently slow, whereas the nvidia driver also experience a few severe slowdowns and so has a much more mixed set of results.

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