Nvidia To Release Scaled Back ION LE
August 4th, 2009 by Avram Piltch, LAPTOP Online Editorial Director 
Fudzilla is reporting that Nvidia has introduced a lower-priced version of its ION chipset, which is branded as ION LE. Like the original ION, the LE is designed to boost the graphics performance of Atom CPUs by providing a faster alternative to Intel’s sluggish graphics chip. However, unlike the original ION, the ION LE will only support Direct X 9, which means it won’t play all the latest games that take advantage of Direct X 10, which comes standard with Windows Vista and is supported by Windows 7 (which has Direct X 11). Considering that most netbook users would be happy to be able to play 1080p video, which even this new chip will allow, it’s hard to see a big disadvantage to ION LE, even when compared to the original ION. Nvidia spokesperson Ken Brown assured us that the new chip will work well with Windows 7, stating “ION LE is fully compatible with Windows 7 and provides the same level of graphics performance as ION, but it will not support DirectCompute or DirectX 10 APIs.”
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August 5th, 2009 at 8:07 am
If developers would simply use OpenGL, they wouldn’t have to worry about all these licensing costs.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:54 am
it makes me sad that Nvidia is forced to scale back his ION to please the greed of Intel
December 15th, 2009 at 5:36 am
Nvidia ddn’t scale back anything … remember the 8600 GT and 8600 GTS ?! back then all i had to do is just simply find a match of the bios of the 8600 GTS to make the 8600 GT like it’s older brother … and some people done that ( i had the DDR2 so i couldn’t ) , so now … nvidia just made a new bios that won’t take advantage of DX10 but actually all 311 mini’s are capable of playing DX10 games .. and it works like a charm you can check google about that , Nvidia is not smart by doing that … specially after it was blowen up 2 years ago ( maybe ) . but hey once i’ll get my hand on this baby am gonna hack the **** out of it ! lol .