If you remember, when the iPad 3 was announced officially on stage by Tim Cook and co, Apple said that the new A5X processor inside it is 4 times faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 3 solution released last year. Now that the new iPad is out, the folks of LaptopMag decided to put these claims to the test, through some benchmarks.
Four tests were run in order to determine if the A5X really is superior to the Nvidia Tegra 3. These tests are GLBenchmark 2.1, Geek bench plus the web browsing tests Peacekeeper and Sunspider. In GLBenchmark 2.1 graphics performance is the key and it was one of the few tests with versions for both Android and iOS, so that’s why it was chosen. In this benchmark, the iPad won clearly, as shown in the image above. If you go past the beautiful screen, however, you’ll notice that the Transformer Prime (Tegra 3 tablet used for the test) offers some extra visual effects that aren’t shown on the new iPad. The game Riptide, for example showed some very cool water reflections and a splashing effect that was very cool.
The Geekbench is a cross platform benchmark, that measures raw processing power and not graphics. In this one, Tegra 3 came out victorious and achieved a score of 1,571, compared to the mere 692 points of the A5X. As far as the browser tests go, Safari and the Android browser were pretty close with 386 points for the iPad and 387 for the prime in Peacekeeper, at least. The Apple slate won a last round in Sunspider, as the it completed the Javascript rendering in just 1810 milliseconds, compared to the Prime’s 2216 ms.
There’s also a comparison video from LaptopMag shown below, in order to highlight those extra effects on Tegra 3. In the end I can say that the Apple A5X isn’t that good when compared to the Tegra 3, but it’s still a pretty good chipset:
