ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTVideo Playback: Blu-ray Quality in a Tablet
One of the biggest issues with Tegra 2 based tablets and smartphones is a limitation that prevented hardware accelerated decode of any high profile H.264 video content. You could still decode the video but the additional stages of the decode process were left to run on the CPU, which in turn resulted in substantially lower battery life. NVIDIA has completely addressed the problem with the Tegra 3's video decoder, which is now capable of decoding 1080p H.264 high profile streams at up to 40Mbps.
The Honeycomb video player (Gallery app) will play .mkv files by default but if you want to throw on a .m2ts file you'll need to grab a third party player. DICE Player for Android supports Tegra 3's hardware acceleration, making it a good option if you want broader file compatibility.
Android File Transfer won't push over a file greater than 4GB so the first thing I tried was ripping a portion of A Quantum of Solace (BD) and sending over a 40Mbps High Profile 1080p MKV of it. The resulting 10 minute segment was 2.8GB in size and played beautifully on the Prime. There were no dropped frames and no hiccups, it just worked.
External NTFS volumes are supported and the sdcard file system supports files greater than 4GB in size, so I copied a 15GB 1080p Blu-ray rip of A Quantum of Solace from a USB stick to the Prime. I had to use DICE Player to get audio but otherwise the clip just worked. The biggest pain was copying the huge file across, but it'd be quicker and less painful than a re-encode on most systems.
To really test my luck I threw a few of our media streaming test files at the Prime. Our 720p60 test file worked perfectly, while our 1080p60 test case was mostly smooth with the exception of occasional slowdowns. I tried playing back a 1080p30 VC1 file however I couldn't get it to play back with hardware acceleration. Some of the more exotic combinations of features and file types wouldn't work, although I suppose that could be the fault of the playback software.
As far as I can tell, Tegra 3 and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime in particular are capable of playing back 1080p24 Blu-ray class video. Total NAND capacity is the only thing limiting us from just dumping a raw Blu-ray rip onto a tablet and playing that directly. Pretty much any HD rip you make yourself or find online will likely work. You may still need to invest in a good third party player to ensure things like subtitles are properly supported however.
I'm pleased with the state of video on the Prime. It's not HTPC level, but we can finally play really good quality video on an Android tablet. I suspect it'll be one more generation before we get tablets (and associated software) that will just play anything you throw at them.
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MiSoFine - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
my 2 cents...get a Kindle fire. Easier UI for non tech parents & it's still android; cheaper also. Or a Vizio vTab.I got my Mom a Kindle Fire, kids a vTab (they will at least attempt to try to figure it out) & myself a (preordered) Prime.
steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
Considering the complete lack of Android tablet apps, that doesn't seem wise.Enkur - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
What is that android app that shows the per core CPU activity in the screenshot above?Lucian Armasu - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, just remember to note, or even test the real world performance when iPad 3 and other high resolution tablets arrive.In your benchmarks they should be showing even faster performance at 720p with the upcoming faster chips, but that might not be the case in the real world. Remember how low FPS the iPhone 4 got with its 4x the resolution over iPhone 3GS, when tested at native resolution?
That should be happening to iPad 3 and the others, too, even if the chips get faster by then. I would wait until at least 2013 to get a 2k resolution tablet, so I won't be that significantly impacted by it.
Lucian Armasu - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Also is there a way to compare the graphics between Tegra 3 and iPad 2 without comparing the benchmark numbers? Like comparing the best graphics on Tegra 3 versus the best one on iPad 2, and notice the differences between them? I really don't think the benchmark numbers tell the whole truth.I think Tegra 3 games may even look/work better than A5 games, thanks to its quad core CPU, too, but I figure you should be able to tell that better than me since you have both.
vision33r - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I disagree, in PC and Console world, the GPU is the determining factor in game graphics and performance.You can take a Core i7 using HD3000 integrated graphics and compare it with a Core i3 with an ATI 4850 and it will spank the Core i7 in gaming performance.
That's what's happening here is the Tegra 3's GPU is underwhelming from a graphics chip maker.
Very few mobile games imo need even dual core, they need the proper graphics acceleration and that's where Android fragmentation has hurt game development.
They have to code games for the lowest common denominator instead of optimizing games for Tegra.
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
That doesn't necessarily translate to the mobile world. On the desktop side, CPU's have gotten so fast that just about any task a game can throw at it -- physics, AI, audio, etc. -- can be done without bottlenecking the game while the shading/rendering on the GPU is still being pushed.On the mobile side, this may not be true (yet) as the CPU's are -- comparatively -- fairly underpowered against their desktop counterparts. Couple this with the fact that the GPU is taxed to push out less pixels and one could easily see situations where the CPU becomes the bottleneck.
As mobile CPU's get faster -- especially with the A15/Krait generation -- this will become less and less of an issue especially as games make use of NEON to do their computationally heavy tasks and we'll get to a point where the GPU is the only bottleneck left.
But I don't see that happening until we hit the ~2.5GHz dual A15/Krait level.
vision33r - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Very few Android games that I've seen are properly optimized unless they got that Optimized for Tegra logo. Otherwise most games do not take advantage of GPU acceleration.On iOS almost all games has some sort of GPU assist. Take Plants vs Zombies, the iOS version is perfect. The Android HD version has lower animation and graphics.
Almost all Gameloft games perform smoother on iOS than on Android.
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Well yes. But the point is that with a higher performance CPU or group of CPU's, it is possible to have things that would be bottlenecked in a mobile device -- such as physics, AI, etc. -- be more complex and provide better visuals.Whether or not that has been done is another story. But you can hardly blame application devs for pouring more focus into iOS. The iPad is still what, ~90% of the tablet market? Moreover the App Store brings in way more revenue -- which the developers get a cut of -- than Android Market has thus far.
That will hopefully change over time.
steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
The problem with that theory is iPhones still bring in vastly more revenue for developers than android phones, despite the latter having higher market share.