ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTTegra 3 GPU: Making Honeycomb Buttery Smooth
The bigger impact on the overall experience is the Tegra 3's GPU. If you remember back to our initial analysis of Tegra 3 you'll know that the GPU is not only clocked higher but it also has more execution resources at its disposal. To further improve performance, per "core" efficiency is up thanks to some larger internal data structures and tweaks. The end result is much better gaming performance as well as a much smoother UI.
Tasks like bringing up the apps launcher or even swiping between home screens are finally far above 30 fps. While Tegra 2 didn't have the fill rate to deal with some of the more complex overlays in Honeycomb, Tegra 3 does. The move to Tegra 3 makes the Honeycomb experience so much better. This is what it should've been like from the start.
Gaming performance is also significantly better as you can see from our standard collection of Android GPU benchmarks:
Performance is still not quite up to par with the iPad 2, but if we look at GLBenchmark's Egypt test Tegra 3 doesn't do too bad. The gap grows in more texture bound tests but in a heavier shader environment Tegra 3 isn't too shabby. While it's clear that Tegra 2 wasn't enough to deal with the 1280 x 752 resolution of Honeycomb tablets, Tegra 3 seems well matched.
Note that the BaseMark ES2.0 tests run at FP16 on Tegra 2 and 3 vs. FP24 on the PowerVR SGX 543MP2.
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Tchamber - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'm glad you brought up the fact that the Prime has a higher resolution than the iPad2, I think a lot of people overlook that when then see performance numbers. This seems to be the tablet I wanted when I bought my 1st gen iPad, if I like it, I'm done with Appletunes. Thanks for the good review.tim851 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
They were reviewed at the same resolution(s)...hakimio - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
CNET reviewers also got a unit with defective WIFI. So don't worry - you are not alone.Morelian - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Nice review. As an original Ipad owner I am always interested in new tablets but so far nothing since the original Ipad would get me to replace my current tablet. I did get my wife an Ipad 2 and while it is speedier the function of my original product still holds up.I really don't get the back camera on these things-a tablet is too big to really use as one's camera of choice and if you have a tablet surely a phone would be preferable? The front facing cam I understand and that would let people do the facetime/skype thing which I see as potentially useful.
I take my Ipad to work with me. When I have spare time, I'll use it to check my email-much easier to read on the Ipad than my phone and the Ipad facebook app is pretty good. If things get really slow I can open a book and read. Rarely I'll watch something on Netflix but currently I don't have Netflix going because the kids grab the Ipad at home and watch cartoons instead of doing homework.
As to doing work I just don't see it. A few months ago I got a Toshiba 14 inch laptop from Best Buy for 500 bucks. My thought was if I got good use out of it I'd get a Macbook Air and toss the laptop to the kids but technical limitations at work prevent me from doing what I'd really like with the notebook. The Toshiba laptop has an Intel processor with the Intel graphics, I doubt it could game and never tried, but it tosses up web pages nicely and has a nice keyboard. I can do work on it and don't mind typing on it. To do work I need Windows compatibility and I can't see where the Asus tablet would help me there.
So, I don't really get this docking station except for a way for Asus to make a few extra bucks for people who don't know what they want to use a tablet for. To me a tablet is something lightwight you use for data consumption, and for "work" you need something that runs Windows software and is reasonably designed for data entry.
The Windows 8 tablets might be the place where things are headed but a Win8 tablet with a docking station keyboard is a notebook.
I guess we'll see where all is headed.
efficacyman - Monday, December 5, 2011 - link
The rear facing camera can be used for scanning in documents using google documents or other scanning applications. The better the quality of the camera, the better the quality of the resulting product. The best camera you have is the one you have with you all the time. If you are using your tablet as your work machine, having a camera with you that is high quality can't hurt.Stupido - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'm not following this tablet development much, but I kind a like the "tablet idea"...But so far I haven't seen any tablet with USB support. Is this notion OK or I'm missing something?
Death666Angel - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If by USB support you mean USB host capabilities (as in, you can plug a USB stick in and read data off it), every modern tablet/smartphone I know can do that, except Apple iStuff.Mice, gamepads, printers etc. are a more complicated matter.
Stupido - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
By complicated matter I guess you refer to the driver level of the OS?Because once you have USB host, than I guess it will be up to the OS to provide the correct drivers?
I don't know how different are the kernels (and their corresponding driver architecture) between Android and Linux...
I just know that Android is a fork of the standard Linux kernel...
Death666Angel - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yup, driver implementation and program support was what I was getting at. :-)If you are interested in that sort of stuff, XDAdevelopers is always a great place for any smartphone/tablet questions of a technical nature.
Stupido - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Thx! I'll check that...