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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thunng8 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
It would be pretty hard to beat the visuals of Infinity Blade II on the ipad2. The game looks amazing.TrackSmart - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand,Just a heads-up, as I know you had to get this review out the door quickly: It would be really useful to put the weight of the tablet AND keyboard dock prominently on the first page (maybe in the chart?). This would make it easier to compare the total travel weight to ultraportables and netbooks.
I'm guessing that we're talking about 2.6 pounds from what I could find online. And you'd end up with some serious battery life (18 hours?) compared to even the longest running Zacate (or Atom) laptops/netbooks. If only the software and hardware capabilities were as good...
biassj - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Asus looking good but tablets can't replace x86 PCs yet. I hope Asus launches a 15" Zenbook with 1080 display and maybe even a quad core Ivy bridge. I don't mind if it's thicker but I want something to compete with the rumor Macbook Air 15".HighTech4US - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Will the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime be retested here when ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) is released for it?My understanding is that there are improved graphics drivers and other improvements in the OS that will improve on the results shown here.
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,It seems that the results of the Ipad 2 and Transformer Prime are quite different in GLBenchmark 2.0.3 Egypt (tested by PCworld) vs. what you have found based on the vs. 2.1 of the same benchmark. Could you comment what may be the reason for the differences?
"The most significant result in our gaming performance tests: The Transformer Prime logged 53 frames per second, the highest frame rate we've seen on the GLBenchmark 2.0.3 Egypt test with no antialiasing. This result topped the Apple iPad 2's previous record of 46 fps, and it just crushed the Android masses we've tested, which averaged 18 fps and topped out at 34 fps (for the 7-inch Acer Iconia Tab A100)."
https://www.pcworld.com/article/245256/asus_eee_pa...
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Also wanted to add that other sites show much longer battery life for the Transformer. I understand that the battery life depends on use but could be that your unit is a dud in not only in case of WiFi but also battery, so I wonder if you would be willing to repeat the battery test?Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'm already on it :) Got a new Prime in this morning and battery life is looking much better already.Take care,
Anand
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
The tests in the article were done using an off-screen resolution of 1280x720. This allows all devices to be tested at the same resolution -- thus measuring the relative rendering performance of the SoC.Looking at the results on GLBenchmark's own website:
http://www.glbenchmark.com/result.jsp
Correlate to what is posted in the article.
The ones posted by users of Tegra-3 devices:
http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedetails.jsp?benchm...
Also correlate with the results of the article. I suspect that version 2.0.3 may stress different parts of the GPU or that PC World got some pretty bad results.
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Well I usually do not play games off-screen :) Anyway, I am still puzzled what is causing the huge difference between the 2.0.3 Egypt vs. 2.1 (assuming both test were done correctly).Also while comparing Ipad 2 at theoretical 720p has merits in synthetic testing in practice you can not see more than 1024 by 768 pixels on the Ipad 2.
I am also wondering if GLBenchmark better than lets say 3dMark for desktop? 3D Mark scores do not always correlate perfectly with real games experience due to optimizations for particular card and also because synthetic testing is not a perfect substitute for real games to start with. So I am not overly concerned about the scores more about what have changed between the GLBenchmark versions.
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Absolutely. But unfortunately few games for mobile if any offer time-tests and there is no equivalent framerate tool like FRAPs to measure framerate in real games.So synthetic benchmarks will have to do for now.
As for 2.0.3 vs 2.1, GLBenchmark's website doesn't give all too much info except that it includes the off-screen mode as well as "high quality" versions.
But it does mention that 2.1's throughput tests -- which I don't think impact Egypt -- perform warm-up loops in order to cache a lot of its data before measuring GPU throughput.
Other than that, I'm not really sure what changed.