CES 2013 | Popular benchmark claims Tegra 4 is slower than both the iPad 4 and Nexus 10

Nvidia revealed what we were all expecting at CES 2013 - A quad-core Tegra 4 SoC based on the Cortex-A15 architecture. During the presentation, Jen-Hsun Huang showed off browsing benchmarks where the Tegra 4 came out on top and above both the iPad 4 and Nexus 10.

According to early benchmark results, however, Nvidia's latest Tegra SoC underperforms in the popular graphics benchmark GLBenchmark 2.5 and even comes out behind the Apple and Google tablets. A reasonable explanation for the lower than expected numbers are the immature drivers for as the Tegra 4 SoC is not yet available in the consumer market. The screenshots and results from the original poster have now been removed, but are still available via Google's web cache.

In the synthetic benchmark, Tegra 4 returned 32.6 FPS for the Egypt Offscreen HD (1080p) test while the quad-core PowerVR SGX554MP4 GPU in the iPad 4 returned nearly 50 FPS in the same test. The ARM Mali-T604 GPU in the Nexus 10 reached values greater than 35 FPS in the test as well.

Nvidia's marketing director Nick Stam mentioned in a CES interview that the integrated GPU in the Apple A6X does make up an extremely large portion of the SoC, but Stam continues to stress that Nvidia is working very closely with software and game developers on optimizing drivers. This concept led to a handful of games being optimized specifically for Tegra systems.

Additionally, Stam has confirmed that the GeForce ULP cores in the Tegra 4 will not use unified shaders. The GPU will instead utilize 48 and 24 discrete pixel and vertex shaders, respectively.

Quelle(n)