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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steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
If you want the best tablet for your grandmother, shouldn't you be making decisions based on her needs and not yours?SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, do You think the Dual Core Snapdragon S4 will be able to beat the Quad core Tegra3? Thnx :)A5 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
As with any core-based discussion, it depends on what you're doing.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yeah, depends on how well optimized applications are for multicore. In most cases I'd bet a fast dual core would beat a slower quad.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If I'm not mistaken, Honeycomb doesn't have GPU acceleration on all windows by default like ICS will, and ICS will also have better multicore optimization. I'd like to see some benchmarks on the Prime after ICS.HighTech4US - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I second this request.SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Another question: Any info about the audio chip? I mean: Can we expect wolfson Galaxy S quality? Tnx!Willhouse - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Why is the cost drifting up instead of down? The whole appeal of the original transformer was that is was "comparable" in quality but $100 less than other quality tablets. Those of us who are mildly interested in tablets, but can't stomach the costs, aren't going to rush out to buy this even if it is the best android tablet. Is there a large tablet enthusiast market that needs the absolute best hardware at all times?Sorry if this was mentioned - I was immediately outraged and didn't read all the comments.
Roland00Address - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
The Transformer Prime has 32 and 64gb for the internal storage (with micro sd expansion). Note the base model is not 16gb.32gb
499 Transformer Prime
599 Ipad 2
64gb
599 Transformer Prime
699 Ipad 2.
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If you want to get a tegra 2 tablet cheaper than 400 you should be looking at the winter sales on such products, it may not be the asus transformer but it is stlil a tegra 2 honeycomb tablet. No one is going to release a better product cheaper than there old gen, in a cut throat market with decreasing margins unless that product has serious competition.
Kegetys - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Is it correct that it doesn't come with 3G (or 4G) connectivity at all? I'm so used to being able to be connected almost anywhere with both my cellphone and laptop with zero hassle that being restricted to WLAN only would be quite a limitation for a mobile device like this.Also, seriously Asus, why cant you have those beautiful IPS screens available for laptops as well?