Nvidia announced a netbook gaming platform featuring its GeForce 9400M, to be called Ion. Ion-compatible systems will be those featuring the graphics chipset along with the traditional netbook Intel Atom processor. This means that Ion netbooks should be able to handle more modern games and more complicated digital video; Nvidia claims a five-times improvement over existing gaming performance and of ten over current video processing speeds. For an example of the Nvidia chipset's performance, the 9400M is the same graphics processor included in the latest Apple MacBook laptops.

Although you'd still be pushing the limits of comfortable netbook performance, Vista should be more manageable to run with the help of this graphics acceleration. According to Nvidia, Ion systems will carry a price premium of around fifty dollars over run-of-the-mill netbooks featuring the common Intel graphics chipset. If you've been waiting on picking up a netbook until you could find one capable of pumping out a few rounds of Call of Duty 4, be on the lookout for models running the Ion platform in the first half of 2009.

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