The Google Nexus 9 Review

GPU Performance

While Denver is new, the Kepler GPU in the Tegra K1 is mostly a known quantity by now. In the Nexus 9, the GPU is still a single SMX clocked to 852 MHz. In order to verify performance, we turn to our standard test suite. For the most part, our GPU-bound tests are meant to represent gaming performance although tests like 3DMark can have CPU-bound aspects while GFXBench tends towards being a pure GPU test.

The Nexus 9's GPU has effectively identical performance to what we saw in the SHIELD Tablet, which means that the Nexus 9 should be able to support a broad range of games without performance issues. There is a bit of a noticeable performance delta when comparing on-screen performance, but this is simply due to the higher resolution of the Nexus 9's display. The one notable exception is the 3DMark physics test, which seems to scale with core count quite well, and that causes Denver to fall slightly short of the quad A15 configuration.

NAND Performance

While storage performance can often be secondary to a smooth user experience, poor storage performance is extremely painful. This is similar to RAM, where the difference between 2 and 3 GB is generally academic, while the difference between 512MB and 1 GB is enormous. While there have been some issues with Androbench with the move to Android 5.0, it seems that the timer issues have since been resolved, so it's possible to resume using the results from Androbench to get a rough idea of NAND performance.

Here the Nexus 9 doesn't suffer nearly as much from full disk encryption that is forcibly enabled on the device; performance is noticeably higher than what we see in the Nexus 6. This seems to lend some credence to the theory that CPUs with ARM v8 ISA would be better suited to handling the need to encrypt and decrypt storage in real time. I tested the Nexus 9 with a custom kernel without full disk encryption to see how Androbench scores might change, but this didn't have a noticeable impact which seems to back this theory, although I'm still not confident that FDE is a good idea to enforce across all new devices.

The NAND itself, a Samsung eMMC package designated by the name BWBC3R, seems to be quite performant outside of pure sequential access, which seems to suggest that HTC hasn't skimped out in this area at all, and the use of F2FS is responsible for some of the best random I/O scores in any mobile devices we've tested thus far.