On six of the benchmarks that we use regularly in PCWorld Labs testing, this MDP outscored our entire field of Android tablets, and came closer to the Apple iPad than any other model in our GLBenchmark tests. If the MDP tablet's performance carries over to the actual shipping product, Qualcomm's S4 Pro could be the new performance leader for Android tablets.
In the current Android tablet field are many models with Nvidia's Tegra 3 platform, the fastest Nvidia competitor for the Snapdragon system-on-chip, or SoC. Earlier this year, a leaked Nvidia roadmap indicated that the company was readying the Tegra 4 for the first quarter of 2013; if that plan holds, and wasn't accelerated for a release later this year, Snapdragon could be the snappiest SoC around for holiday shoppers.
The most direct matchup is between the S4 Pro MDP/T and the Nvidia Tegra 3-based , the best of our Android performers until now. On some metrics, the performance gap was clearer than on others. On the Geekbench benchmark, the S4 Pro MDP/T was 23 percent faster than the Infinity; but on AndEBench's native test, the S4 Pro MDP/T was only 2 percent faster.
The S4 Pro MDP/T blasted through tests involving Web browsing. On AndEBench's Java test, the S4 Pro MDP/T was 15 percent faster, which may be a testament to some of the Web browsing performance enhancements that Qualcomm has discussed focusing on with the S4 Pro SoC. And on Sunspider, the S4 Pro MDP/T completed the benchmark in 1.2 seconds, 37 percent less time than the Infinity, and 28 percent less time than the , one of our previous stars on this test.
We used GLBenchmark to measure the graphics performance of the new Adreno 320 graphics processor that's in the S4 Pro's system-on-chip. Here, the S4 Pro MDP/T ran away from the rest of the Android field: On Egypt Offscreen, it scored 132 frames per second, and on Pro Offscreen it scored 183 fps. We use Offscreen to measure performance because it's a truer torture test of the chip's graphics potential, without factoring in resolution constraints. By comparison, the scored 139 fps and 244 fps respectively. And the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity scored 74 fps and 96 fps, respectively.