The first Nvidia Ion 2 netbook has been benchmarked, and the early results are disappointing: the Acer Aspire One 532G's next-gen GPU managed to underperform the older Ion LE.

The benchmarking was done by Netbook News while at MWC, who managed to run a 3DMark03 graphics benchmark test during their hands-on time. The resulting score of 3,049 is lower than some Ion LE netbooks achieve; the Samsung N510, for example, scores a 3,593.

There are possible explanations, of course, and we won't know for sure how the Ion 2 stacks up until we're able to test a production-ready unit. As Netbook Choice points out, it's possible that Acer and Nvidia purposefully hamstrung the machine to keep it stable during demonstrations. Then again, it's also possible that Nvidia has had a difficult time working with the Aspire One 532G's Pine Trail processor. Let's hope it's the former: the last thing netbooks need is even more limited graphics capabilities.

[Netbook News via Netbook Choice]