Two disappointing Acer Aspire One benchmarks

1. 3D Graphics benchmark

open a terminal (Alt+f2, 'terminal')

Code:

sudo yum install glaxium

launch glaxium in fullscreen 800x600 mode using

Code:

glaxium -f -3 &

Press F3 to benchmark, I get ~27fps. (An Eee pc 701 at default speed gets ~25fps, at 900mhz overclock gets ~38fps, this is not promising)

EDIT 'in 640x480' mode (glaxium -f -2 &) I get 39fps, which compares more favourably with the eee pc

2. cpu benchmark

ftp://pi.super-computing.org/Linux/super_pi.tar.gz

Code:

tar xvf Downloads/super_pi.tar.gz
./pi 20

Takes ~80secs for a million digits of Pi (Again not impressive, the Eee 701 @900Mhz is ~5 secs faster)

 

i have been watching things about gaming on the AAO

and I guess I have to wonder why anyone would have bought any of the current Atom /945 netbooks w/ gaming in mind.... It seems to me that everyone knew it was going to be "mediocre" at gaming at best.

that said the Mame performance is WORSE than I was expecting =p however meh... I'll live.

 

Mame performance is ok if you use xmame in xv mode (not sdl version of mame) and if you use the gxmame frontend you must not set the option to 'Sleep when idle', for some reason the atom processor cannot deal with this very well, at least if I look at framerates.

The Asus Eee pc overclocked to 900mhz can play most games with some nice effects like 'light scanlines', the Aspire One is ok with no effects, but can't match the 900mhz celeron eeepc.

I will post a detail howto soon, mame install is a little tricky.

 

I ran:
glaxium -f -3 &
Avg Fps 46

glaxium -f -2 &
Avg Fps 59

I think your aao needs some more tweaking.

 

That's very cool, I ran from a default install, how did you tweak?

 

There are so many things I've lost track! LOL! Everything you need to know is somewhere in these forums though. Good Luck!

 

Benchmarking x or y fps, or calculating pi, is only important if the performance difference gained by tweaking makes a difference to the things you normally do on the netbook. If browsing, email, media playback all work smoothly even at stock settings, then fine, nothing to worry about. It does seem like the default Limpus install isnt making good use of the GM950 though.

 

I guess you added 'export INTEL_BATCH=1' to the end of the /etc/profile file (and rebooted)

This gives me the increased framerates you report (but also increases the Eee PC scores, though not as much and causes some graphics glitches)

I'll see how stable the unit is with this setting, post back in a few days or so (It's a significant 'fix' if there are no side issues, and makes the AAO a true EeePC beater)

 

ok, the INTEL_BATCH=1 edit to /etc/profile doesn't seem to cause any instability, I've been running a tv viewer and a few emulators and virtualbox XP for a couple of days with no problems, even with compiz enabled. But it does cause minor graphical glitches in Chromium BSU for example, so I assume it will cause glitches in other games requiring direct rendering. I haven't the time to do exhaustive testing, but I have kept the setting on my machine for the time being.

My guess is that this only improves performance on some simple 3d apps like glaxium and glxgears, but not in general.

 

The Aspire One also performs poorly with jack audio apps such as rosegarden, zynaddsubfx. On the 900mhz Celeron eee pc I can get about 6 tracks to playback in rosegarden, and the zynaddsubfx synthesizer works very nicely with a not too bad latency (~40msecs), but on the Aspire One rosegarden can hardly playback one track, and zynaddsubfx has horrible glitches and distortion. Same with vkeybd & qsynth - fine on 900mhz celeron eeepc, barely functional on the 1.6Ghz atom Aspire One.

So looks like the Intel Atom @1.6Ghz is pretty miserable in performance terms.

The manufacturers were just too eager to cash in on the netbook phenomenon, when the technology isn't quite ready yet. Give it a year for a dual core atom to appear, then we'll be talking truly functional netbooks.

 

What do you want for 350 bucks? It's not designed to be a gaming machine in any way, shape or form. You might as well complain that a Yugo benchmarks worse than a Porsche.

 

It's disappointing that the Aspire One performs worse than the year-old Asus eee pc. This original eeepc was great, at a great price, now we have overpriced, rushed attempts at copying that little bit of inspiration by Asus. This 2nd generation of netbooks is almost a step backwards, the technology isn't quite ready yet, the manufacturers are too greedy.