Upcoming Nvidia Shield Tablet X1 flexes its graphics muscle in leaked GFXBench result
Last week, Nvidia announced the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1, a successor to the original Shield Tablet that maintains most of the hardware specs but drops the stylus and $100 off the price tag. At $200 for the base model, the Shield Tablet K1 offers good value for the money but it wasn't the tablet that Nvidia fans have been waiting for. That tablet, as it turns out, appears to have recently surfaced in a leaked benchmark result.
On the software side, the Nvidia Shield Tablet X1 is listed as running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but the details of Nvidia's custom implementation remain unknown at this point.
Before moving any further, it should be noted that the benchmark does provide us with confusing information. For one, the cameras are listed as "not supported". Furthermore, the Tegra X1 is listed as relying solely on a 1.9GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 CPU, while the standard version of the chip also integrates four additional ARM Cortex-A53 cores.
Nvidia announced its new Tegra X1 SoC all the way back this January at CES 2015, claiming that the chip brings substantial improvements - such twice the GPU performance - over the Tegra K1. Given that the Tegra K1 chips which power the original Shield Tablet, the Google Nexus 9, and the Xiaomi Mi Pad were already top-ranking performers, there was reason for mobile gamers to get excited.
Unfortunately, however, the company limited the availability of its chip to its Shield Android TV console for the better part of 2015. Back in October, the Google Pixel C became the first Tegra X1-powered tablet ever unveiled, but even Google's laptop-tablet hybrid has yet to become available for purchase.
Extreme GPU Performance
The leaked GFXBench result also shows how the Nvidia Shield Tablet X1 prototype behaved in various 3D graphics tests. In short, the results are nothing short of extreme. Compared to the original Shield Tablet, the Tegra X1 variant is listed with twice the performance, thus supporting Nvidia's claim. In terms of average fps, the leaked result shows the tablet running circles around devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 or the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet. In fact, the Shield Tablet also beats the Apple iPad Air 2 in every single test, and in some of them by a pretty good margin.
Although Nvidia did claim that the Tegra X1 doubles the GPU power of the Tegra K1, these statements are rarely taken for specific and accurate. Hopefully, we're not looking at an altered benchmark result, and Nvidia is on the verge of nudging the mobile gaming industry a step forward.
Previous rumors said that the Nvidia Shield Tablet X1 will be available just in time for the 2015 holidays, but with the end of the year fast approaching and late December rarely being the time for new product announcements, an early 2016 launch would not be unthinkable.
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