You may remember that when Apple announced the new iPad earlier this month, the company bragged about how its A5X processor had quad-core graphics support that was four times that of NVIDIA"s quad-core Tegra 3 processor. You may also remember that NVIDIA then asked Apple to prove their statements and offer their benchmarks to support their claims.
Apple, as expected, did not comment on NVIDIA"s challenge. However, Laptopmag.com has now done their own independent testing of the A5X and the Tegra 3, using the new iPad and Asus" Transformer Prime tablets; the final result backs up Apple"s claims but only to a point.
Using the 2.1 version of the GLBenchmark 2.1 graphics test program, the web site said that the new iPad processed 6718 frames at a rate of 60 fps on the Egypt Standard test. This compares to the Transformer Prime’s 5,939 frames at 53 fps on the same test. Using GLBenchmark"s Geometric test, the new iPad scored 7,530,524 frames at a rate of 57 fps compared to the Transformer Prime"s 3,523,926 frames at a rate of 27 fps.
However, using the processor power-based benchmark Geekbench produced very different results. In that case, the Transformer Prime generated an overall score of 1,571 compared to the new iPad"s score of 692.
Not only that, but some games on the Transformer Prime have additional visual effects compared to the versions currently available on The New iPad. For example, the game Riptide on the Asus tablet had more reflections in the water compared to the iPad version. When running Shadowgun, the Transformer Prime showed off flags in the levels that moved; those flags did not show up in the iPad version. You can see the differences in the video above.