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A5X vs. Tegra 3 benchmarked

Were Apple's claims that the A5X was four times faster than the Tegra 3 based on very selected benchmark tests, or does the silicon have more to offer?
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

LAPTOP Magazine has put Apple's claim that Apple's new iPad's A5X chip offers four times the performance of NVIDIA's Tegra 3 CPU to the test.

For the test Apple's new iPad was pitted against ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first tablet to feature the Tegra 3 processor.

The results are all over the place. In the GLBenchmark Fill test the iPad's A5X comfortably beat the Tegra 3, processing 1.98 billion textels per second compared to 404.61 million for the Tegra 3.

However, when it came to the Geekbench test, which measures processor performance rather than graphics, the Tegra 3 with its quad-core CPU comfortably beat the A5X, achieving an overall score of 1,571 compared to 692 for the A5X.

The test team then played two games on the tablets to see if there was a difference, and the results of this test were also inconclusive:

"Our experience playing Shadowgun and Riptide on the two tablets shows how difficult it is to separate processor performance from other system components like the screen. It's likely that, if we could put a gorgeous 2048 x 1536 screen on the Transformer Prime, these games would have both the great special effects and the sharp, beautiful images."

It's worth noting that neither Shadowgun nor Riptide has yet been optimized for the A5X chip, so it's possible that developers will be able to squeeze more power from the A5X in a later update.

Were Apple's claims that the A5X was four times faster than the Tegra 3 based on very selected benchmark tests, or does the silicon have more to offer?

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