Nvidia’s Ion reference platform has been doing the review rounds today. It’s white now, which has made it even uglier. Curious from a company that prides itself on visual quality.

Sadly, it seems it’s not the dream platform for HTPC enthusiasts wanted it to be, as some of the statements in the reviews give me pause.

Somehow the engineering sample that ended up in reviewers' hands got even uglier (Image credit: TechReport).

AnandTech tested Casino Royale, Sony’s product placement love-fest, ripped from a Blu-ray disc to ISO using AnyDVD HD:

As expected, hardware acceleration worked. Casino Royale was encoded in H.264 and the Ion platform decoded it flawlessly. CPU utilization was high averaging between 40 – 50% on a single-core Atom machine with Hyper Threading enabled:

There were some scenes where the CPU utilization peaked to over 90%. While we didn’t see any dropped frames, keep in mind that we’ve already decrypted the disc, the CPU is actually doing less here than if we were playing a Blu-ray disc directly from a drive. I suspect that playing back encrypted content it is possible for the Ion platform to drop frames if CPU utilization jumps out of its comfortable 40 – 50% average.

Bad news. TechReport also found VC-1 decode to be below expectations in regards to 1080i:

28 Days Later and Click are encoded with H.264 and MPEG2 codecs, respectively, so what about Blu-ray’s third format, VC-1? We use Nature’s Journey to test VC-1 performance, and on the Ion platform, playback was surprisingly choppy, pegging our single-core Atom config’s CPU utilization at 100%. Nvidia says it optimized PureVideo HD for 1080p content, and that Nature’s Journey playback is choppy because it’s actually a 1080i movie—a format the company claims is a shrinking niche. According to Nvidia, the problem here isn’t processing horsepower, but memory bandwidth. A dual-channel Ion setup, the company says, should play back Nature’s Journey smoothly.

We’ve seen Nature’s Journey exhibit comparatively higher CPU utilization than other Blu-ray movies on a Core 2-equipeed GeForce 9300 system, so the title clearly presents a considerable challenge. Enabling the Ion rig’s second Atom core did lower CPU utilization considerably, and while playback was smoother, it wasn’t as silky as the other movies.

Looks like we may be back to mATX and 790G, which isn’t as tiny and hidable, but at least with a decent processor and GPU VC-1 decode it shouldn’t drop frames, ever.