Media Playback And Performance Scaling
In spite of recent performance improvements, none of the low-energy platforms appears to be suitable to any task greater than light office work and perhaps media playback. Many users view media playback as the exclusive purpose of this platform type, so we cued up Chapter 2 of our “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” Blu-ray and “A Man Apart” DVD to make sure the performance was available.
H.264 hardware acceleration looked a little weak on all three low-energy platforms, and we found that disabling it had little impact on overall performance. The Nano DC significantly outpaces its rivals in DVD acceleration…if that still maters to anyone.
VIA mentioned gaming…and the ION 2 actually prevailed. To be fair, we wouldn't recommend gaming on any of these onboard graphics solutions, though. Intel's Core i3 integrated GPU appears a total embarrassment here, though it actually won in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and tied in DiRT 2. The two games that decimated Intel's percentages, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat and Crysis, weren't even playable on the so-called winning hardware.
Encoding is where the Nano DC shines, relative to other low-energy solutions. We have yet to see how much energy is required for the desktop CPU however.
If a 1.8 GHz Atom is just a hair too slow for your office needs, the Nano DC addresses that slight performance difference.
