Do we get to see a full review of the Motorola Atrix HD? Would like to know how the battery performance and other factors compare to the Samsung GS3 and the HTC One X.
In reality the SG3 I just purchased has a pretty decent graphics chip in it and overall outperforms the iPhone equivalent.
I know the iPhone is about to be replaced and will likely return to the top but I dont care I am still happy with my purchase and the performance of the phone.
And what do you use your top graphics performance in your SGS3 for? Which games take advantage of it? I sold mine and went back to an iPhone 4S after it became obvious that the great chipset (international) only exists to inflate benchmarks and accelerate Android to a level not quite the smoothness of iOS. Where are the Infinity Blades, and all the other Apps which could take advantage of it and why aren't developers interested in making use of these powerful chips on Android?
Which games use are optimized for 4 CPUcores and perform better than 2? Seriously interested to know because it's not obvious (if it even exists out there at the moment). On the other hand the GPU performance pretty much scales just by putting "more" in the box.
Apple hater here, won't buy another iProduct since Apple is still an arrogant bully. Also, I stop playing games with my iPhone 3gs and SGS2, after realizing mobile games are just plain boring(rehash of the same games over and over and over again). I did game about 2+ years with 3gs and SGS2.
Apple products can never do usb-plugin-file-transfer. Who needs iTunes when you can drag and drop. Worst pain-point with 3gs, got a lot of dead brain cells trying to make iTunes work with 3gs :(
3gs went into my collection chest, iPad 2 just went to gf after I got my Nexus 7. Wish someone can take my 13" 2011 MBA. I tried to give it to my brother for free, but failed. He preferred a HP 15" Envy that can actually do games, lol.
It would also be great to see an update addressing the Verizon versions of the Galaxy SIII (i.e. how battery life shakes out between the various models). I remember mention of this some weeks back, but never saw it appear. Probably not high on the list, since the hardware is so similar to the other models.
Great... I am pretty much SOLD on it. Both my business partner and my own Galaxy Captivate are 2 years old. Mine has slowing showing touch-screen issues and lock ups, GPS was always crap on GS1. But his suddenly died yesterday!
They only had a single Red SGS3 in stock and the HTC One. I think the newer Samsung and the home button is what sold him.
I had the chance to play with a dummy Atrix HD, in terms of weight and feel... and that *IS* important to me. I don't use covers on my phones or iPad. Also, Apple is pissing me off with being a patent troll over the rectangle and BS on prior art.
Anyho, I almost went with the HTC-One X (like the LED light), but the button arrangement and concerns with its coating rubbing off pretty much nixed it. The SGS3... is such a fingerprint magnet... why go with the cheap plastic cover? It took seconds to make the nice red-back look "dirty". Oh, it comes with a cleaning cloth - oh wow. He put a cover on it anyway.
Since all phones are now HUGE, the AtixHD is slightly the smaller of the bunch. While the back of the phone is plain flat. The feel of the phone is excellent. Its not TOO thin on the sides... and *I* did like the feel of the various textures as well. Battery is not removable has me concerned (resetting the phone), as I'm used to pulling out the battery... I like the curvature of the phone and that in my pocket, I know its orientation. Unlike most Samsungs.
From the ratings on at&t, people are saying the battery is a bit weak (like all smart phones) but I would expect and hope its a lot better than my Captivate! On your reviewers, older Motorola phones seem to have better battery life than my captivate - which in all honesty, I never really liked. It was "the best" at the time. Also, some raters said the speaker (speaker phone mode) is very loud.
So, unless the phone blows chunks... I'm 95% sure it will be my next purchase. The Home button on the SGS3 is a selling point to me... but I don't seem to want that phone. Know what I mean?
You seem to be missing the A5X datapoint in the Triangle Texture Test - Fragment Lit Offscreen figure on the tablet page.
Any chance of putting in Apple A4 and Adreno 220 results, tablet and/or smartphone, as reference points? Those devices would be coming up to the 2 year upgrade cycle that most people likely follow so it'd be useful to see how things have progressed.
Everyone on this site hates Apple but look who came out on top in the most important performance category.
Yet, people keep touting how much better the Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets are and here we are the iPad 2 and iPad 3 is just beasting these benchmarks.
I don't really game on Android anyways, lack of high quality games. Only thing worth playing are emulators and most of the good games are iOS ports.
Yet the iphone has infinitely better looking games and the interface is smoother (versus the sometimes smooth, sometimes choppy SGS3 especially when you start to use its internal storage. Unless you buy your devices to run benchmarks on them exclusively, then Apple wins here.
My retired Motorola Razor flip phone is smoother than iPhone 4s, does it make it a better phone than iPhone 4s? Yes, I purposely comparing a "dumb" phone against the "smart" phone. I'll pick the flip phone over iPhone any day, that's how much I'm against Apple. Sad...
Luckily I don't have to, my SGS2 is working as a champ.
Could you at least try to convince us that you're not a Troll. Try being a little more subtle. Keep practicing, as there will be lot's of great Apple stories this fall for you bitch about.
The Int. SGS3 is fast but the downfall is the OS. There are hardly any worthy games on Android which is why I picked the SGS3 USDM since Android is CPU + memory hungry.
iOS is clearly made for avg folks but there are just too many good games and apps that Android will always be behind.
Android phone + iPad 3 is the best combo right now.
android phone + Nexus 7 + Xbox360 or PS3 > Android Phone + iPad3 for games when it comes to a ~$700 outlay.
Besides, there's plenty of fine games on Android, which play even better with a PS3 controller. On-Screen controls for graphically demanding games typically suck. Games that play best with touchscreen controls are typically not graphically demanding.
"The pressure is on for Apple to deliver something between the A5 and A5X in the next generation iPhone this fall."
Well, Apple just needs to clock the 32nm A5 in the iPhone 50% higher (to 1.2GHz, just 20% higher then the A5 in the newer iPad 2) to be consistently on top again. But 100% (to 1.6GHz) would be better. Too bad the really big jump in performance will probably have to wait until 2013 with a dual/quad-core big.LITTLE and Rogue.
50% clock speed bump may be good enough against current SoC at the time of launch, but with Adreno 320, Tegra 3+ T37, Wayne, and Mali-T604 around the corner, Apple's going to need to do better than that to hold the GPU performance crown into 2013.
A 50% jump in CPU and GPU performance is no slouch, remember that the iPad 3 had zero improvements to the CPU and because of the Retina display, the 543MP4 just barely keeps up with the 2048x1536 resolution increase in anything that heavily relies on the GPU.
big.LITTLE will come with more of an advantage to Samsung's Exynos than any other SoC ATM. The sole reason being that Exynos 5 (and beyond) is probably the only (announced) chip equipped with the Mali-t604 (and t658) GPU. Other than the advanced GPU features and the unified shaders, ARM's Midgard architecture was developed and fully optimized for load balancing, FPU offloading, and interconnect coherency, some of the major architectural selling points of big.LITTLE (other than the obvious load balancing of low power (cortex a7) and high performance (cortex a15) CPUs).
PowerVR's offerings are great, but they're just not as compatible.
Anyone else notice some strange stuff going on with the offscreen vs "native" resolutions in the tests?
For example: "new" iPad @ 2048x1536 gets 1857 and offscreen at a lower 1080p (almost 50% less pixels) gets a LOWER score of 1784? How does that work unless its not really running @ 2048x1536 but is being upscaled?
The Nexus 7 has a similar issue, where it gets a better score when going offscreen to a higher resolution.
Oh god, get the fuck over yourself. No every benchmark issue is somehow some evil corporate conspiracy. Get your head checked. People like you, doesn't matter what brand they love/hate, have metal issues. Come back to reality
Irregardless, it's always nice to have more data, but I'm still left wondering why most of the current benchmarks are given such weight. They don't necessarily reflect actual performance in common applications, and the systems are often different enough to make direct comparison a bit confusing.
The Meizu MX uses an Exynos. I think Samsung will gladly license their SoCs to others, but currently the others prefer Krait, OMAP, Tegra, ... Probably because Samsung doesn't promote their Exynos and does not support it as good for third parties as the others do with their SoCs.
Could there be a nasty performance hit due to Android?
Here's what I'm seeing:
Based on specs, clockspeeds, and resolution differences, the Apple A5 (SGX543MP2) in the iPad 2 should be posting ~2.5x-3x better performance vs the OMAP4430's SGX540 GPU in the Xyboard.
The A5 seems to be posting 4x-5x performance over the OMAP4430.
There are very few differences between the SGX540 and SGX543 on paper... the 543 supporting OpenGL 2.1 vs 2.0 for example but it doesn't seem like those differences would explain the actual performance differences we're seeing here.
Am I missing something or could this suggest that the hardware isn't really showing its' true colors on Android?
The SGX543MP2 is three times faster than the SGX540. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012... Now you can change the clock speed to further improve things. And then there's the thing with the memory. The wider the memory bandwidth the faster the GPU (see performance boost in asus infinity due to the faster RAM). I don't know the numbers, but I it's likely that the A5 has more memory bandwidth.
And finally it's the software. I don't think it's right to say: 'performance hit due to Android', because they use a native programming language to code the benchmarks on Android, so no VM overhead. It's more how they optimize it for the specific operating system. Because the source code is unknown they can do whatever they want, they don't have to stay fair or invest the same amount of energy in optimizing the app for the Tegra 3 or Omap processor as they did for the Apple SoCs. Such benchmarks, especially if they get run on totally different and incompatible operating systems are always difficult to compare. Additionally do different GPUs feature different special features, which enhance the image quality. But how can you compare those incompatible features with other SoCs which use different techniques? So those benchmarks only test the raw processing power, games might still look worse on a faste GPU due to the lack of those special features (see comparisons between Tegra 3 and iOS versions of games, the same games for Tegra 3 have water effects, smoke, ..., while the other versions don't)
Can't that be said about most Android software vs iOS software as well? iOS provides a mouch more limited set of configurations that need to be addressed by developers for optimal performance. Android developers have to account for much wider variety, decreasing the likelihood that any one product will be optimized (possible exception being those products under the Tegra banner, that receive special attention/support by nVidia). This means that the synthetic benchmarks actually mimic the marketplace in that iOS software is more likely to be optimized vs an Android counterpart..
My International Note overlocking the GPU to 400mhz gets 51fps on that last Egypt test offscreen. That is the reason I am holding for a Note 2 and hopefully featuring an upgrade in GPU.
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57 Comments
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Belard - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
Do we get to see a full review of the Motorola Atrix HD? Would like to know how the battery performance and other factors compare to the Samsung GS3 and the HTC One X.As well as how it performs in these tests above.
Brian Klug - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
Jason I. is working on a review of the Atrix HD right now :)-Brian
tipoo - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
Did all the comments on this article just get deleted?Brian Klug - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
No this is a new article with iOS benchmarks (we did this to minimize confusion, even though it seems to have caused confusion?)-Brian
Samus - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Wow...where are all the Apple haters now?KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Not much to say in the face of realitycknobman - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
? What are you talking about?In reality the SG3 I just purchased has a pretty decent graphics chip in it and overall outperforms the iPhone equivalent.
I know the iPhone is about to be replaced and will likely return to the top but I dont care I am still happy with my purchase and the performance of the phone.
robinthakur - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
And what do you use your top graphics performance in your SGS3 for? Which games take advantage of it? I sold mine and went back to an iPhone 4S after it became obvious that the great chipset (international) only exists to inflate benchmarks and accelerate Android to a level not quite the smoothness of iOS. Where are the Infinity Blades, and all the other Apps which could take advantage of it and why aren't developers interested in making use of these powerful chips on Android?LetsGo - Thursday, August 2, 2012 - link
Infinity Blade? The game has good graphics but is poor on gameplay, Give me GTA III or Shadow Gun any day.IOS hardware plays good for Graphical Benchmarks, However when it comes to games CPU power is just as important for AI, physics and graphic setup.
darkcrayon - Sunday, August 5, 2012 - link
Which games use are optimized for 4 CPUcores and perform better than 2? Seriously interested to know because it's not obvious (if it even exists out there at the moment). On the other hand the GPU performance pretty much scales just by putting "more" in the box.amdwilliam1985 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Apple hater here, won't buy another iProduct since Apple is still an arrogant bully.Also, I stop playing games with my iPhone 3gs and SGS2, after realizing mobile games are just plain boring(rehash of the same games over and over and over again). I did game about 2+ years with 3gs and SGS2.
Apple products can never do usb-plugin-file-transfer. Who needs iTunes when you can drag and drop. Worst pain-point with 3gs, got a lot of dead brain cells trying to make iTunes work with 3gs :(
3gs went into my collection chest, iPad 2 just went to gf after I got my Nexus 7. Wish someone can take my 13" 2011 MBA.
I tried to give it to my brother for free, but failed. He preferred a HP 15" Envy that can actually do games, lol.
darkcrayon - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
You couldn't make iTunes work with a 3GS...Focher - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
I'll take your MBA for free. I'll even pay for shipping.UltraTech79 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
Sounds more like user error than hardware error. Maybe get a clue?TrackSmart - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
It would also be great to see an update addressing the Verizon versions of the Galaxy SIII (i.e. how battery life shakes out between the various models). I remember mention of this some weeks back, but never saw it appear. Probably not high on the list, since the hardware is so similar to the other models.As usual, thanks for the hard work!
Belard - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Great... I am pretty much SOLD on it. Both my business partner and my own Galaxy Captivate are 2 years old. Mine has slowing showing touch-screen issues and lock ups, GPS was always crap on GS1. But his suddenly died yesterday!They only had a single Red SGS3 in stock and the HTC One. I think the newer Samsung and the home button is what sold him.
I had the chance to play with a dummy Atrix HD, in terms of weight and feel... and that *IS* important to me. I don't use covers on my phones or iPad. Also, Apple is pissing me off with being a patent troll over the rectangle and BS on prior art.
Anyho, I almost went with the HTC-One X (like the LED light), but the button arrangement and concerns with its coating rubbing off pretty much nixed it. The SGS3... is such a fingerprint magnet... why go with the cheap plastic cover? It took seconds to make the nice red-back look "dirty". Oh, it comes with a cleaning cloth - oh wow. He put a cover on it anyway.
Since all phones are now HUGE, the AtixHD is slightly the smaller of the bunch. While the back of the phone is plain flat. The feel of the phone is excellent. Its not TOO thin on the sides... and *I* did like the feel of the various textures as well. Battery is not removable has me concerned (resetting the phone), as I'm used to pulling out the battery... I like the curvature of the phone and that in my pocket, I know its orientation. Unlike most Samsungs.
From the ratings on at&t, people are saying the battery is a bit weak (like all smart phones) but I would expect and hope its a lot better than my Captivate!
On your reviewers, older Motorola phones seem to have better battery life than my captivate - which in all honesty, I never really liked. It was "the best" at the time. Also, some raters said the speaker (speaker phone mode) is very loud.
So, unless the phone blows chunks... I'm 95% sure it will be my next purchase. The Home button on the SGS3 is a selling point to me... but I don't seem to want that phone. Know what I mean?
codedivine - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
Well the older benchmark also had a "Pro" part. Does the new version only have a Egypt HD?Brian Klug - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
The new version has Egypt HD and Egypt Classic, Pro is now retired basically.-Brian
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
You seem to be missing the A5X datapoint in the Triangle Texture Test - Fragment Lit Offscreen figure on the tablet page.Any chance of putting in Apple A4 and Adreno 220 results, tablet and/or smartphone, as reference points? Those devices would be coming up to the 2 year upgrade cycle that most people likely follow so it'd be useful to see how things have progressed.
H.A.L. 9000 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
LOL. A4 would run this at probably LESS than 1FPS. SGX535 and an 800MHz Cortex A8... Adreno 220, maybe.repoman27 - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
I don't think it means what you think it means.hurrakan - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Inconceivable!vision33r - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
Everyone on this site hates Apple but look who came out on top in the most important performance category.Yet, people keep touting how much better the Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets are and here we are the iPad 2 and iPad 3 is just beasting these benchmarks.
I don't really game on Android anyways, lack of high quality games. Only thing worth playing are emulators and most of the good games are iOS ports.
Pipperox - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Well that's true in the tablet division, but not in the smartphone.The triangle / fill rate tests are meaningless, they do not represent any actual workload that will ever appear in any game or application.
In the Egypt tests, the Galaxy SIII comes out on top, although the iPhone 4S performs pretty well.
robinthakur - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Yet the iphone has infinitely better looking games and the interface is smoother (versus the sometimes smooth, sometimes choppy SGS3 especially when you start to use its internal storage. Unless you buy your devices to run benchmarks on them exclusively, then Apple wins here.amdwilliam1985 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
My retired Motorola Razor flip phone is smoother than iPhone 4s, does it make it a better phone than iPhone 4s?Yes, I purposely comparing a "dumb" phone against the "smart" phone. I'll pick the flip phone over iPhone any day, that's how much I'm against Apple. Sad...
Luckily I don't have to, my SGS2 is working as a champ.
TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Could you at least try to convince us that you're not a Troll. Try being a little more subtle. Keep practicing, as there will be lot's of great Apple stories this fall for you bitch about.UltraTech79 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
Your Razor has a shit old UI. The UI in iOS and Droids is a modern one. So nice try there, troll.vision33r - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
The Int. SGS3 is fast but the downfall is the OS. There are hardly any worthy games on Android which is why I picked the SGS3 USDM since Android is CPU + memory hungry.iOS is clearly made for avg folks but there are just too many good games and apps that Android will always be behind.
Android phone + iPad 3 is the best combo right now.
c4v3man - Tuesday, August 7, 2012 - link
android phone + Nexus 7 + Xbox360 or PS3 > Android Phone + iPad3 for games when it comes to a ~$700 outlay.Besides, there's plenty of fine games on Android, which play even better with a PS3 controller. On-Screen controls for graphically demanding games typically suck. Games that play best with touchscreen controls are typically not graphically demanding.
tipoo - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
"most important performance category" isn't objective. Some would say CPU performance is more important.Mike1111 - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
"The pressure is on for Apple to deliver something between the A5 and A5X in the next generation iPhone this fall."Well, Apple just needs to clock the 32nm A5 in the iPhone 50% higher (to 1.2GHz, just 20% higher then the A5 in the newer iPad 2) to be consistently on top again. But 100% (to 1.6GHz) would be better. Too bad the really big jump in performance will probably have to wait until 2013 with a dual/quad-core big.LITTLE and Rogue.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - link
50% clock speed bump may be good enough against current SoC at the time of launch, but with Adreno 320, Tegra 3+ T37, Wayne, and Mali-T604 around the corner, Apple's going to need to do better than that to hold the GPU performance crown into 2013.dagamer34 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
A 50% jump in CPU and GPU performance is no slouch, remember that the iPad 3 had zero improvements to the CPU and because of the Retina display, the 543MP4 just barely keeps up with the 2048x1536 resolution increase in anything that heavily relies on the GPU.lilmoe - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
big.LITTLE will come with more of an advantage to Samsung's Exynos than any other SoC ATM. The sole reason being that Exynos 5 (and beyond) is probably the only (announced) chip equipped with the Mali-t604 (and t658) GPU. Other than the advanced GPU features and the unified shaders, ARM's Midgard architecture was developed and fully optimized for load balancing, FPU offloading, and interconnect coherency, some of the major architectural selling points of big.LITTLE (other than the obvious load balancing of low power (cortex a7) and high performance (cortex a15) CPUs).PowerVR's offerings are great, but they're just not as compatible.
DracoNB - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Anyone else notice some strange stuff going on with the offscreen vs "native" resolutions in the tests?For example:
"new" iPad @ 2048x1536 gets 1857 and offscreen at a lower 1080p (almost 50% less pixels) gets a LOWER score of 1784?
How does that work unless its not really running @ 2048x1536 but is being upscaled?
The Nexus 7 has a similar issue, where it gets a better score when going offscreen to a higher resolution.
amdwilliam1985 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Great catch.I wouldn't be surprise an unethical company such as Apple doing unethical stuff.
darkcrayon - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Even though he said the Nexus 7 had the same "problem"?Nevermind, I see you're the same one trolling up the rest of the comment section with gibberish.
UltraTech79 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
Oh god, get the fuck over yourself. No every benchmark issue is somehow some evil corporate conspiracy. Get your head checked. People like you, doesn't matter what brand they love/hate, have metal issues. Come back to realityjadawgis732 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Unrelentless is not a word, it's just terrible English.Uritziel - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
This.UltraTech79 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
"This." Is not a sentence, it is useless retardation.Cavalcade - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Irregardless, it's always nice to have more data, but I'm still left wondering why most of the current benchmarks are given such weight. They don't necessarily reflect actual performance in common applications, and the systems are often different enough to make direct comparison a bit confusing.sarge78 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Why are they much higher on the GLBenchmark results website? Which one is reporting it wrong, the website or client?(The One S also gets the some results as the US One X, the fill test etc must've been performed in a lower power state or something)
mshdk - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I find it weird that nvidia produces Tegra 3 with lover fix performance than the apple chips considering nvidia primarily producing gfx cards.tipoo - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Right now they use fixed function hardware, like the Geforce 7k era. The next Tegra will use Kepler era shaders.Uritziel - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
'unrelentless' ... really?Kidster3001 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Irregardless fits right in there with UnrelentlessDman23 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
WOW. Apple's A series of chips are excellent. Apple's tablet SoC is a beast!amdwilliam1985 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Too bad it's "made" by Apple and for Apple iProduct only.Sad for the tech industry.
darkcrayon - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Designed by Apple.Doesn't Samsung pretty much reserve the Exynos exclusively for (some of) their own tablets and phones?
UpSpin - Thursday, August 2, 2012 - link
The Meizu MX uses an Exynos. I think Samsung will gladly license their SoCs to others, but currently the others prefer Krait, OMAP, Tegra, ... Probably because Samsung doesn't promote their Exynos and does not support it as good for third parties as the others do with their SoCs.UltraTech79 - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 - link
Yeah so sad, unless you're not full of yourself and buy the product that is best regardless of your weak bs brand loyalties.Draiko - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Could there be a nasty performance hit due to Android?Here's what I'm seeing:
Based on specs, clockspeeds, and resolution differences, the Apple A5 (SGX543MP2) in the iPad 2 should be posting ~2.5x-3x better performance vs the OMAP4430's SGX540 GPU in the Xyboard.
The A5 seems to be posting 4x-5x performance over the OMAP4430.
There are very few differences between the SGX540 and SGX543 on paper... the 543 supporting OpenGL 2.1 vs 2.0 for example but it doesn't seem like those differences would explain the actual performance differences we're seeing here.
Am I missing something or could this suggest that the hardware isn't really showing its' true colors on Android?
UpSpin - Thursday, August 2, 2012 - link
The SGX543MP2 is three times faster than the SGX540.http://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012...
Now you can change the clock speed to further improve things. And then there's the thing with the memory. The wider the memory bandwidth the faster the GPU (see performance boost in asus infinity due to the faster RAM). I don't know the numbers, but I it's likely that the A5 has more memory bandwidth.
And finally it's the software. I don't think it's right to say: 'performance hit due to Android', because they use a native programming language to code the benchmarks on Android, so no VM overhead. It's more how they optimize it for the specific operating system. Because the source code is unknown they can do whatever they want, they don't have to stay fair or invest the same amount of energy in optimizing the app for the Tegra 3 or Omap processor as they did for the Apple SoCs. Such benchmarks, especially if they get run on totally different and incompatible operating systems are always difficult to compare. Additionally do different GPUs feature different special features, which enhance the image quality. But how can you compare those incompatible features with other SoCs which use different techniques? So those benchmarks only test the raw processing power, games might still look worse on a faste GPU due to the lack of those special features (see comparisons between Tegra 3 and iOS versions of games, the same games for Tegra 3 have water effects, smoke, ..., while the other versions don't)
mevensen - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Can't that be said about most Android software vs iOS software as well? iOS provides a mouch more limited set of configurations that need to be addressed by developers for optimal performance. Android developers have to account for much wider variety, decreasing the likelihood that any one product will be optimized (possible exception being those products under the Tegra banner, that receive special attention/support by nVidia). This means that the synthetic benchmarks actually mimic the marketplace in that iOS software is more likely to be optimized vs an Android counterpart..shaolin95 - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
My International Note overlocking the GPU to 400mhz gets 51fps on that last Egypt test offscreen.That is the reason I am holding for a Note 2 and hopefully featuring an upgrade in GPU.