09 November 2011

NVidia Ion 1st Gen or GeForce 9400m

It is no big news that the HP Mini 311's NVidia Ion graphics chip is basically the GeForce 9400m. While that is true and tested while I was on the Windows side - 720p .mkv files would play fine, as I remember it - it doesn't seem to be that way on the Mac OS X side.

Earlier this year, my worst experience with playing those HD video files (I was watching "Iris", yes, it's a Korean action drama), was that there would split-second freezes here and there but no green artefacts littering VLC's video window like I see now.

Perhaps it's CUDA driver related? Maybe. I should get some time to test whether that's the root of evil. It's either that or the 512MB rated for the Total VRAM is only eye-candy.
Update: Nope, it is not eye candy. Use Plex player for Mac OS X and you'll see that the Mini 311 can handle 720p .mkv quite smoothly.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

use xbmc or plex. these apps are better at HD playback than vlc. i prefer xbmc becuase of my htpc.

G560 said...

Do you have any experience with OS X installation on computers with N455 CPU?

LeMaurien19 said...

@G560
No, I don't, sorry.