The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTGPU Performance
All of our discussions around the new iPad and its silicon thus far have been in the theoretical space. Unfortunately the state of Android/iOS benchmarking is abysmal at best today. Convincing game developers to include useful benchmarks and timedemo modes in their games is seemingly impossible without a suitably large check. I have no doubt this will happen eventually, but today we're left with some great games and no way to benchmark them.
Without suitable game benchmarks, we rely on GLBenchmark quite a bit to help us in evaluating mobile GPU performance. Although even the current most stressful GLBenchmark test (Egypt) is a far cry from what modern Android/iOS games look like, it's the best we've got today.
We'll start out with the synthetic tests, which should show us roughly a 2x increase in performance compared to the iPad 2. Remember the PowerVR SGX 543MP4 simply bundles four SGX 543 cores instead of two. Since we're still on a 45nm LP process, GPU clocks haven't increased so we're looking at a pure doubling of virtually all GPU resources.
Indeed we see a roughly 2x increase in triangle and fill rates. Below we have the output from GLBenchmark's low level tests. Pay particular attention to how, at 1024 x 768, performance doubles compared to the iPad 2 but at 2048 x 1536 performance can drop to well below what the iPad 2 was able to deliver at 10 x 7. It's because of this drop in performance at the iPad's native resolution that we won't see many (if any at all), visually taxing games run at anywhere near 2048 x 1536.
GLBenchmark 2.1.3 Low Level Comparison | ||||||
iPad 2 (10x7) | iPad 3 (10x7) | iPad 3 (20x15) | ASUS TF Prime | |||
Trigonometric test—vertex weighted |
35 fps
|
60 fps
|
57 fps
|
47 fps
|
||
Trigonometric test—fragment weighted |
7 fps
|
14 fps
|
4 fps
|
20 fps
|
||
Trigonometric test—balanced |
5 fps
|
10 fps
|
2 fps
|
9 fps
|
||
Exponential test—vertex weighted |
59 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
41 fps
|
||
Exponential test—fragment weighted |
25 fps
|
49 fps
|
13 fps
|
18 fps
|
||
Exponential test—balanced |
19 fps
|
37 fps
|
8 fps
|
7 fps
|
||
Common test—vertex weighted |
49 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
35 fps
|
||
Common test—fragment weighted |
8 fps
|
16 fps
|
4 fps
|
28 fps
|
||
Common test—balanced |
6 fps
|
13 fps
|
2 fps
|
12 fps
|
||
Geometric test—vertex weighted |
57 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
27 fps
|
||
Geometric test—fragment weighted |
12 fps
|
24 fps
|
6 fps
|
20 fps
|
||
Geometric test—balanced |
9 fps
|
18 fps
|
4 fps
|
9 fps
|
||
For loop test—vertex weighted |
59 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
28 fps
|
||
For loop test—fragment weighted |
30 fps
|
57 fps
|
16 fps
|
42 fps
|
||
For loop test—balanced |
22 fps
|
43 fps
|
11 fps
|
15 fps
|
||
Branching test—vertex weighted |
58 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
45 fps
|
||
Branching test—fragment weighted |
58 fps
|
60 fps
|
30 fps
|
46 fps
|
||
Branching test—balanced |
22 fps
|
43 fps
|
16 fps
|
16 fps
|
||
Array test—uniform array access |
59 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
60 fps
|
||
Fill test—Texture Fetch |
1001483136 texels/s
|
1977874688
texels/s |
1904501632
texels/s |
415164192
texels/s |
||
Triangle test—white |
65039568
triangles/s |
133523176
triangles/s |
85110008
triangles/s |
55729532
triangles/s |
||
Triangle test—textured |
56129984
triangles/s |
116735856
triangles/s |
71362616
triangles/s |
54023840
triangles/s |
||
Triangle test—textured, vertex lit |
45314484
triangles/s |
93638456
triangles/s |
46841924
triangles/s |
28916834
triangles/s |
||
Triangle test—textured, fragment lit |
43527292
triangles/s |
92831152
triangles/s |
39277916
triangles/s |
26935792
triangles/s |
GLBenchmark also includes two tests designed to be representative of a workload you could see in an actual 3D game. The older Pro test uses OpenGL ES 1.0 while Egypt is an ES 2.0 test. These tests can either run at the device's native resolution with vsync enabled, or rendered offscreen at 1280 x 720 with vsync disabled. The latter offers us a way to compare GPUs without device screen resolution creating unfair advantages.
Unfortunately there was a bug in the iOS version of GLBenchmark 2.1.2 that resulted in all on-screen benchmarks running at 1024 x 768 rather than the new iPad's native 2048 x 1536 resolution. This is why all of the native GLBenchmark scores from the new iPad are capped at 60 fps. It's not because the new GPU is fast enough to render at speeds above 60 fps at 2048 x 1536, it's because the benchmark is actually showing performance at 1024 x 768. Luckily, GLBenchmark 2.1.3 fixes this problem and delivers results at the new iPad's native screen resolution:
Surprisingly enough, the A5X is actually fast enough to complete these tests at over 50 fps. Perhaps this is more of an indication of how light the Egypt workload has become, as the current crop of Retina Display enhanced 3D titles for the iPad all render offscreen to a non-native resolution due to performance constraints. The bigger takeaway is that with the 543MP4 and a quad-channel LP-DDR2 interface, it is possible to run a 3D game at 2048 x 1536 and deliver playable frame rates. It won't be the prettiest game around, but it's definitely possible.
The offscreen results give us the competitive analysis that we've been looking for. With a ~2x die size advantage, the fact that we're seeing a 2-3x gap in performance here vs. NVIDIA's Tegra 3 isn't surprising:
The bigger worry is what happens when the first 1920 x 1200 enabled Tegra 3 tablets start shipping. With (presumably) no additional GPU horsepower or memory bandwidth under the hood, we'll see this gap widen.
234 Comments
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BSMonitor - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Common might have been the wrong word. But for the masses of users(mostly consumer space), internet browsing is probably the most frequent task. But overall time spent on the devices, I would guess movies/videos are #1.mavere - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
The iPad's h.264 decoder has always been especially efficient.If Apple's battery life claim is 10 hours, I'd expect 11-12 hours non-streaming video playback.
Openmindeo - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
In the second page it says that the ipad 1 has a memory of 256GB .The entire article was fine.
Regards.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Thanks for the correction!Take care,
Anand
isoJ - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Good points about the future and a clear demand for low-power bandwidth. Isn't PS Vita already shipping with Wide-IO?BSMonitor - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I only have an iphone so I have not played around with the home sharing and all that in iTunes.Can they communicate locally via WiFi for Movies, Music, etc(without a PC or iCloud)?? My impression is that they must be connected to iTunes or iCloud to access/transfer media content.
i.e. I have a 64GB iPhone 4, and load it with 20 movies and GB's of music. And say a 16GB iPad. Can I transfer a movie from the iPhone to iPad with it going to the PC/Mac or iCloud first?
darkcrayon - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
You can transfer movies if you have a movie player app that supports it, several apps support file transfers over wifi (for example GoodReader can copy any of its files to GoodReader running on another device). You could use GoodReader and similar apps instead of Music to play songs, though it's not as well integrated into the OS (but songs will still play and switch in the background, etc).You can not transfer things you've previously loaded into the Music or Videos (ie the built in "Apple apps") between two iPads though.
BSMonitor - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Thanks. I figured as much.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
On page 11 you say:"Perhaps this is why Apple forbids the application from running on a first generation iPad, with only one CPU core."
I don't think the single CPU core is the primary reason why iPhoto isn't supported on the first gen iPad. Afterall, the same single core A4 iPhone 4 support iPhoto. What's more, the iPhone 4's A4 is clocked lower than the first gen iPad so CPU performance isn't the primary reason. RAM appears to be the main concern with iPhoto since every supported device has at least 512MB of RAM.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Very good point, updated :)Take care,
Anand