New iPad’s A5x chip beats out Tegra 3 in most benchmark tests

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When Apple launched the new iPad on Friday, it did so with a new dual-core A5x processor and quad-core graphics inside. During the product’s unveiling, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller talked about the new chip noting that it provides four times the performance of Tegra 3. Nvidia was quick to question the slide displayed by Apple onstage (pictured right), which did not provide any specific benchmark data. We now finally have some solid benchmark tests courtesy of Laptop Mag that provide us new insight.

For the benchmark tests, Laptop Mag used an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which is powered by Tegra 3, and put it up against the new iPad in GLBenchmark 2.1, Geekbench, and browsers’ benchmarks with Sunspider and Peacekeeper. In its last test (video above), the publication did a side-by-side subjective gaming performance test to try to spot any noticeable differences between the same title running on both devices. Here is what the publication found:

Starting out with GLBenchmark 2.1, the new iPad wins out by processing 6718 frames at 60 fps in the Egypt Standard 3D animation test. In comparison, the Transformer came in at 5,939 frames at 53 fps. Similar results appeared in the program’s other standard tests. The new iPad came in at 7,530,524 frames at 57 fps during the Geometric test compared to the Transformer’s 3,523,926 at 27 fps. However, the Geekbench test, which Laptop Mag pointed out “measures raw processing power rather than graphics,” is where the Tegra 3 was able to outshine the new A5x:

“The quad-core Tegra 3 blew its competitor way as it achieved an overall score of 1,571 to the A5X’s 692. On the integer (1391 to 614), floating point (2408 to 825) and memory subtests (1076 to 784), the Tegra 3 dominated, but the A5X bested it by a small margin of 324 to 266 on the stream subtest.”

Moving onto browser benchmarks, Android’s stock browser against Safari provided almost the same results in Peacekeeper, but the new iPad was able to surpass the Transformer during the SunSpider JavaScript test by completing the test in 1810 milliseconds compared to the transformer’s 2216 milliseconds.

Lastly, Laptop Mag did the side-by-side graphics test with Shadowgun and Riptide running on both devices. However, as you will see in the video above, many of the advantages attributed to the iPad are thanks to the device’s new 2048-by-1536-resolution Retina display and not necessarily the new quad-core graphics.

Cross-posted on 9to5Google.com