Performance, Bechmarks

This brings us to the final task part of the review, sheer performance and gaming tests. Since the Nexus 7 is powered by a Tegra 3 chip, all Tegra Zone games run just fine, including our favorite Shadowgun THD. Angry Birds are always fun, whether you are gaming on a 3-inch or 27-inch screen, and the 7-inch flavor works well too. Nexus 7 is also nice for some pinball games and overall this is a very powerful gaming device that has enough power for just about any Android gamers are likely to throw at it. Even if you are not a gamer, this is good news, as it means the Nexus 7 is future proof.

Since the heart of the tablet is the Tegra 3, we wanted to run it through our usual array of phone tests and compare the scores with a few other devices.



In Quadrant the Nexus 7 loses to the Transformer Prime and its faster 1.5 GHz Tegra 3 chip, as well as to the Infinity Pad with a 1.7GHz Tegra, but manages to run faster than entry level Asus Transformer Pad TF300. There is no doubt that Nexus 7 is faster in just about any test than Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus tablet and its dual-core chip. Nexus 7 is slightly faster in Antutu benchmarks than the rest of the Tegra crowd and it still beats the Galaxy 7.0 Plus by large margin. In Nenamark 2 it runs faster than any competition which came out as surprise and it’s even slightly faster than the Transformer Prime, with a faster processor and same resolution. It is logical that the Infinity Pad with its 1920x1080 screen ends up slower, as there are quite a few more pixels to render. In GLbenchmark the Nexus 7 is among the fastest devices and loses only to the Infinity Pad, but in off screen test you can clearly see that Nexus 7 has comparable rendering performance to the Transformer Pad TF300.

The Chrome browser is very fast and optimized, so it comes as no surprise that it manages to score the highest result in Sunspider and scores the best score in Browsermark. As we saw in our earlier reviews, Jelly Bean tends to score much higher in browser tests than ICS. In CF Bench Nexus 7 delivers equally good results, probably due heavy optimization. The perplexingly low score of the Infinity Pad 700 has been reported web wide without a good explanation.

It is interesting to note that Nexus 7 wins against much more expensive competitors. Last but not least, the quad-core aware AndEBench, where Nexus 7 loses only to Infinity Pad 700 but does well against the rest of the competition including Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0.