Modern Warfare 2 on the Samsung N510 netbook [Video]
February 14, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Netbooks aren’t meant for gaming, or so the saying goes. Nvidia has other ideas with its ION chipset that means you should be able to play even recent games as long as you don’t mind sacrificing settings and resolution. To give you an idea of how well an ION netbook can play games, we have a quick video demo of one of the current best-sellers, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 playing on the 11.6-inch Samsung N510.
It is being played at a resolution of 800 x 600 with the lowest settings. We managed to score between 20 to 30fps on average with the occasional drop below that. I’ve tried it quite a few times and it is actually reasonably playable. Obviously it’s not as smooth as my quad-core PC, but for those times when my desktop isn’t around, it gives you a quick gaming fix. Check out the video of my demo playing the game (badly) below as well as a couple of extra videos looking at HD YouTube Flash and 1080p video content. We have also updated our Samsung N510 review with these videos.
February 14th, 2010 9:36 PM
Tej,
First of all, Very good demo’s you put up there, Just a couple of questions
– Have you tried overclocking the Ion or the atom itself at all to increase smoothness of playback in HD?
-On the N510, Is this a full Ion chipset or the Ion LE?
-Did I see the framerate drop to around 5 near the end of the modern warfare 2?
-What other programs are we looking at that use hardware acceleration?..Windows media player for example?…Quicktime?
It would be interesting to put up my soon to to be Compaq Mini 311c up against this N510 just to see how it goes…Benchmark test maybe?
February 14th, 2010 10:25 PM
Spencer,
I’ve not tried any kind of o’cing, mainly due to a lack of time. The Samsung N510 uses the ION LE chipset rather than ‘full’ ION.
Yes, you are correct the frame rate did drop to around 5/6fps, but on the whole this didn’t happen too often in the games I’ve played.
Windows Media Player 12 uses DXVA, but Quicktime doesn’t. MPC-HC also does and PowerDVD 8 that came with the machine.
Any kind of benchies are always useful – good idea! 🙂