Gaming performance

Gaming performance: Admittedly we are not disappointed. Any GPU with 48 shader cores is considered laughable and a joke compared to today's desktop performance GPUs. But remember, we are gaming on an UltraPortable with a resolution of 1366x768. This does not require heaps of GPU power.

The overall gaming experience with last year's games like Mass Effect and such is actually pretty darn good. You'll see framerates in the 40ies. But what we were really interested in was how well modern games would run.

Tag along in some benchmarks we ran.

So overall we need to forget about AA in the latest games alright. But fair enough, with relatively high image quality settings you can play the games at 30+ frames per second. Once you step down a notch to medium quality settings your overall performance will go up to 35 to 40 FPS in most games. That is a compromise of course, but seen in the grand scale of things, this is nice performance for an UltraPortable. And remember, you are looking at the latest game titles. The older titles will have no real issues playing on this cute little product whatsoever.

We had one occurrence with a game where the NVIDIA Optimus GPU would not kick in and the framerate was dog slow. At that point we manually assigned the game executable to a profile in the NVIDIA control panel, and boom... performance went up as Optimus kicked in. This technology works really well and definitely preserves your energy reserves on this netbook, hence the battery numbers are quite amazing as well.

For the freaks, in 3Dmark Vantage you'll get a 3269 GPU score in the P-mode.