Intel Atom: NVIDIA ION vs. Radeon HD 4330 Graphics

Starting with the World of Padman game, with all five resolutions tested the NVIDIA ION sharply outperformed the Radeon HD 4330. However, the Radeon HD 4330 was using the ill-optimized open-source Mesa driver stack while the ION was running with NVIDIA's proprietary but very powerful graphics driver. The open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver is not in a shape for OpenGL testing right now in Ubuntu 10.04 nor is it used by default and on the ATI Radeon side, we could not use its proprietary Catalyst driver, as the public driver is not yet compatible with X.Org Server 1.7 that's used by Ubuntu 10.04. The Atom 330 system with the GeForce 9400M GPU running with the proprietary driver was playable at all frame-rates up to and including 1920 x 1080. However, the Radeon HD 4330 when powered by Mesa was not playable even at 800 x 600.

With OpenArena, the Radeon HD 4330 led to a mostly playable experience with this ioquake3 game at 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 resolutions, but beyond that, the performance was dismal with the open-source driver stack. Granted, this is also with the kernel mode-setting + DRI2 code paths that are not as optimized as the older user-space mode-setting support, as this week's Radeon KMS vs. UMS tests have illustrated.