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
Not sure about the discrepancies, however, 2.1 is the latest version and it should be the one tested.Also, iOS 5 brought significantly faster openGL drivers, maybe PCWorld were comparing result from a while ago on the ipad2 and iOS4. All onscreen tests are also vsync limited, so the maximum they will ever score is 60fps.
offscreen is somewhat important, as some ipad2 games can render higher output via the HDMI accessory to an external device.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
GLBenchmark 2.1 allows for testing at the same resolution (720p) to enable true apples to apples comparisons of GPUs. There are some slight changes in the workloads as well, so 2.1 numbers aren't directly comparable to 2.0.x numbers.That being said, the iPad 2 should never be slower than the Prime even in an older version of GLBench. I'm not entirely sure what's going on there...
Take care,
Anand
metafor - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
A new version of PowerVR drivers was released some while back (I believe it came with iOS 5) and improved performance dramatically. That may be the issue.GnillGnoll - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
46 fps is an old result on iPad 2. With iOS 5 the Egypt Standard test is almost permanently vsync limited at 60 fps (2.0.3 is gone from the online database, but the workload in the Egypt test hasn't changed between that and 2.1)araczynski - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
if this is supposed to be the next generation of the android tablets, getting slapped around by the ipad2, WHEN THE IPAD3 is 'just around the corner' makes it almost a joke of an upgrade.i don't have any love for apple (pc guy), but i'll be saving my mountain of pennies for an ipad3, rather than bother with an android tablet, have enough random issues with my free DroidX that i couldn't actually image wanting to pay for the 'experience' in a tablet.
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If by "around the corner" you meant April or May of the next year than perhaps, based on your needs, you should wait but then if you wait another couple of month you could get the next gen super-duper tablet and so on and so forth. Anyway your life your choice I ain't canceling my preorder based on the Anand's review.gorash - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
No this is not the next generation of Android, next generation is ICS or Jelly Bean. And iPad 3 is coming next summer.steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
Neither iPad was released in the summer.Ketzal - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'd like to congratulate on a truly superb review. Given the horribly short time you had to write it and do the testing. You did an amazing job.Your reviews are a true breath of fresh air.
The quality of your reviews make the Engadget and like websites look like total amateurs.
Basically it works like this...if you are pondering a new gadget. Wait for your review. If you say it's the one...it's the one. Buy said gadget.
Live happily ever after.
Congrats, I'll be singing your praises to everyone I know.
Ketzal
Wizzdo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
You should consider getting a low-voltage brain in your next life since Anand does your thinking for you. This way your battery might last as long as the iPad2's.Anand may be good but regardless of his reviews "Happily ever after" is about 6 months in this industry.