Nvidia Tegra 4: the first benchmarks

Nvidia’s next-generation mobile processor, the Tegra 4, may have been announced at CES last month, but it’s only today that the company has truly let us get an idea of its pixel-pushing potential. Running a trio of the most popular Android benchmarks on an Android 4.2 development platform, we got to see just how much performance can be squeezed out of a quad-core Cortex-A15 processor with a 72-core GPU.

AnTuTu produced a mind-boggling result of over 36,000, Quadrant 2.0 crossed the 16,000 mark, and GLBenchmark’s Egypt offscreen test at 1080p averaged 57 frames per second. These are all synthetic results — whose relevance to real-world visual and gaming quality is often debatable — but as far as such tests go, the Tegra 4 asserts itself as a thoroughly capable new slice of silicon.

The inescapable downside to the entire demo, however, was that we were gathering these scores on a modular, disjointed device that looks far from retail-ready shape. Yes, Nvidia has announced its own Shield portable console and Vizio has a Tegra 4-powered tablet in the works, but neither of those CES debutantes was made available for benchmarking. It looks like this first A15 chip still has a fair distance to go before making its in-store debut.