Just saw this interesting video where an NVIDIA ION based netbook plays a flash video using the GPU. It is pretty impressive, especially when you see them pop it up on the big screen. Of course there is something that is bugging me about this demo.

If you watch the screen displaying the demo from the ION is flickering very badly. It made watching this a little rough and gave me a headache. Besides that it means that the ION was being displayed on a screen with at least a 120Hz refresh this is twice the refresh on the smaller screen (which should be running at around 60Hz).

I know you are wondering what this has to do with anything; well you see the faster the refresh the slower your frame rate can be and still maintain the appearance of full motion video. It is an old trick, back the CRT days it was not uncommon to see 100Hz refresh rates making 20 FPS games look playable. After all if memory serves the human eye refreshes at about 50Hz. So at 120Hz you are more than doubling the screen refresh which removes much of the stuttering you would see at 60Hz.

It would be interesting to find out more about the test and to see it run on the same display. I have found the 9400 IGP to be little lacking when it comes to HD video even at 720, of course we will have to wait and see what happens once this is out an available to the general public. It will be interesting to see if the performance shown in the video can hold up in the real world.