Acer Aspire Revo SFF NVIDIA Ion PC
Gaming: Left 4 Dead and ET: Quake Wars
We didn't really expect the Acer Aspire Revo to tear through today's hot gaming titles, but with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400 under its hood, the system should be able to provide some level of game play, whereas a competing Intel solution would be a non-starter.
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Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve part-way into development. Like Half Life 2, the game uses the Source engine, however, the visuals in L4D are far superior to anything seen in the Half Life universe to date. The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. We tested the game at resolutions of 1280x720 and 800x600 with gaming quality settings set to medium or high, depending on the feature. |
The Acer Aspire Revo finished a hair behind the NVIDIA Ion reference platform in our Left 4 Dead tests, when the two systems are equipped with the same processor. As you can see though, with a dual-core Atom powering the Ion reference platform, L4D performance jumps much higher. It seems the single-core Atom just doesn't have enough oomph to let the Ion graphics processor spread its wings here.
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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on an enhanced version of id's Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some. In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two. ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many smaller textures. The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously. |
The Acer Aspire Revo also finished behind the NVIDIA Ion reference platform in our ETQW test. Once again, however, with an Atom 330 at the heart of the Ion reference platform, ETQW performance goes up.
