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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mcnabney - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
"Android File Transfer won't push over a file greater than 4GB"That means don't expect to stream HD content off of a home server/computer. Heck, uncompressed DVD-quality might not fit. Massive fail!!!!! Looks like a tablet is still not in my future. Maybe next time the industry tries to make a 'media consumption device' they will do something to allow it to consume media.
name99 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
"Maybe next time the industry tries to make a 'media consumption device' they will do something to allow it to consume media."The bulk (BY FAR) of "the industry" is Apple. As far as I know, iPad handles larger than 4GB files (h264 or otherwise) without a problem.
(I think there is a problem with very large AAC files, but this is a problem with the AAC spec, not with the file size --- you get problems when the number of samples in the file exceeds around 2^31, which happens at around 14hrs for 44k samples/sec.
This appears on other platforms as well, so I'm guessing the container file spec has a 31 or 32 bit field somewhere in it.)
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
4GB is the limit for FAT - if you have exFAT or NTFS formated card should work with no problem.Death666Angel - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
"That means don't expect to stream HD content off of a home server/computer." Streaming should not be affected by the file system limitation, because it streams the content and doesn't save it on the device.lordmetroid - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Can I install another operating system of my choice?Omid.M - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Just held the galaxy tab 8.9 and I think its the perfect size.Likelihood that Asus would release a Prime in that size?
Nice review. ICS and 8.9 screen would've sold me.
@moids
joe_dude - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, will you do a short review when the ICS comes out in January?Thanks for the late-night comment responses, BTW. :)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Absolutely :) Expect to see Brian Klug's first thoughts on ICS before then though :)Take care,
Anand
tipoo - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Good to know, I don't think Honeycomb is well optimized for multicore, ICS sees some nice improvents across the board on them so the Tegra 3 should really shine more once it gets upgraded.isorashi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
My sisters and I are planning on getting my mom a tablet for xmas. She's pretty clueless when it comes to computers -- she can turn one on and start skype, but she needs my dad to check fb / email for pictures of the grand-kids.The choice basically comes down to android vs ios. Transformer Prime in one case, iPad 2 in the other. Personally, I'm leaning towards the android because I have a better idea of what's going on there in case they need help. Plus I like the idea that it can easily interface with their Win7 pc to transfer pictures and what-not. That actually is a statement against the iPad -- I'm very VERY reluctant to inflict iTunes on my parents :-/