Nvidia ION LE hack adds Direct X10 support
Nvidia's Ion chipset comes in two flavors: Ion and Ion LE with the only difference of the two being that Ion offers Direct X10 and Ion LE only offers Direct X9 at a lower price. In an interesting turn of events it appears as though Nvidia intentionally crippled the Ion LE chipset artificially. MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner found that by slightly modifying HP's Ion drivers he could install them on the Ion LE and unlock Direct X10 support!
You'll need to be running a windows 7 netbook to see any difference as Direct X10 isn't supported in Windows XP though. It would make sense that rather than spending a ton of money creating two chipsets they simply created one and intentionally nerfed it to offer a Direct X9 version.
What do you think?
Tagged: Nvidia ION
Oh wow that’s surprising but your assumption does make some sense. Why create two different chipsets when you can simply create one and then nerf it on purpose? Good theory.
It seems like most upcoming netbooks will all have the ION chipset with Direct X10 because of Windows 7 though so it may be somewhat of a moot point.
It was pretty well established on hardware enthusiast websites that ION LE was really just the same thing as ION, but I’m still moderately surprised. This is Nvidia, afterall – they love arbitrarily creating different products and dislike it when something spoils their marketing plans.