The NVIDIA ION platform gets a lot of credit for enabling 1080p video playback on low power computers with Intel Atom processors. But NVIDIA ION systems are also pretty good at playing some (but not all) video games. I’m not much of a hardcore gamer, so I’ve been testing systems like the Asus Eee Top ET2002 with Age of Mythology, a 7 year old game that happens to be the newest PC game in my collection.

At a reader’s suggestion, I did download and try the open source first person shooter Nexuiz, and that also ran smoothly, although I confirmed to myself that I stink at first person shooters.

The folks at Laptop Magazine tried out a few other games for their review of the HP Mini 311 which has NVIDIA ION LE graphics. Basically, ION LE is exactly the same as the ION platform in the Eee Top ET2002 except that ION LE doesn’t support DirectX 10.

You can check out videos of the HP Mini 311 playing World of Warcraft and Spore at Laptop Magazine’s blog. The verdict? Both games are pretty playable since the GPU handles most of the heavy lifting.