NVIDIA Shield Tablet VS iPad Air?

[Victor Johnson]

The iPad Air is more powerful than pretty much every single Android tablet out in the market right now. I am wondering if the Shield Tablet, which is more powerful, has a huge speed advantage compared to the Air. Also, are apps more laggy for the Shield Tablet since iOS Apps are more optimized? Cheers.

 

[Victor Johnson]

Guys? (

 

[CraigN]

The Nvidia shield has more graphics compute power than the iPad Air does. After owning the Shield for a few days, I have not noticed any laggy apps. Also, it is not entirely true that all iOS apps are more "optimized." iOS apps are made within an extremely walled off garden, whereas Android apps are more flexible (though more complex) in their design, and have to be run on a wider range of devices, which means slower devices occasionally do not perform as well as high end devices.

When you compare apples to apples (High end android vs iPhone), Most popular apps generally run fairly similarly on both platforms.

That being said, the Shield tablet will play games better than the iPad air will.

 

[Michael F]

Just got a shield tablet and also have iPad air. Bloons td5 lags on the shield tablet by round 75, I can go to round 125 on the iPad without lag. I'm assuming devs need to update their apps to utilize all its power.

 

[CraigN]

^ This is correct. While the Shield Tablet will play graphically intensive apps better than most Android tablets will, to get the most out of the Shield's GPU, the app has to be optimized for the hardware.

 

[Andrei_316]

Ipad? LOOL Nividia Shield Tablet for sure! But the Windows 8 T100 is really nice... been eyeballing it for awhile now :$ (not good)

 

[soluteyoth]

that right,to get the most out of the Shield's GPU, the app has to be optimized for the hardware. thanks

 

[jimbob76]

NVIDIA Shield Tablet VS iPad Air2 not NVIDIA Shield Tablet VS iPad Air
iPad air 2 and Nvidia Shield Tablet will be out about the same time.
so cpu will be about the same.
gpu will be about the same.
the iPad air 2 will have more scene detail and the Shield will have more effects.
the Shield has it on price, GPU features and pc game streaming
while iPad api 2 has build Quality, lightness, thinness, battery life and touch id
Evenly matched if you ask me.

 

[Ellidor]

Jimbob76 you don't know what your talking about no offence. The new Shield Tablet smokes the competition graphically, The new Maxwell architecture which Nvidia has released essentially has very little limitations. Apple is claiming to have the fastest tablet on the market. This statement is not even close to true when compared to the Windows Surface Pro 3. This being said the Surface Pro 3 is the fastest tablet on the market. The IPAD Air is the most app optimized while the Nvidia Shield delivers the highest graphics. I just purchased an Nvidia Shield tablet with LTE and this GPU crushes my surface pro 3. When using a tablet I care about how the presentation looks graphically. The Ipad and Surface cannot come close to the Nvidia Shield Tablet. I would recommend hands down the Nvidia Shield Tablet as this device graphically impresses me delivering graphics that look as good if not better than my PS4 and Xbox One. This being said Nvidia Shield by far hands down wins at all levels for me.

 

[CraigN]

The Shield Tablet does not use Maxwell graphics. It has a single Kepler SMX, amounting to 192 CUDA cores. Maxwell has thus far only been released for desktop and laptop graphics solutions in the 900 series, not tablets. The Tegra K1 chip (the technical name for the GPU) uses the same architecture as the 700 series. The Tegra K1 in the Shield is also only 32-bit, not the 64-bit Denver K1, whereas the iPad Air 2 has a 64-bit CPU. This will give the ipad some serious advantages.

Also, a few benchmarks have already come live benchmarking the Air 2 against the Nexus 9, which DOES have the 64 Bit Denver Tegra K1 (still on Kepler). The graphics benchmarks are pretty neck and neck, so the Air 2 will probably outperform the Shield Tablet, to be honest, but the Air 2 doesn't stream games, so it's all about what you want to do with your tablet.

The only part where Jimbob was wrong was about when the two were coming out. The Shield has already been out for a few months. The iPad Air 2 just came out. The iPad Air 2 has a serious ability to possibly outperform the Shield Tablet as far as regular apps go. The Shield Tablet however can still stream games better. I appreciate your fervor, Ellidor, but truth is, the iPad can and does come close, if not pass, the Shield Tablet. The original discussion was on the original iPad Air, which, I do believe the Shield Tablet is a better value in comparison. With the game streaming, I'd still buy a Shield Tablet over the Air 2, but statisically, the iPad Air 2 is just as strong a tablet to Nvidia's stronger CPU (the 64-Bit Denver Tegra K1) so there's a pretty good chance it definitely can beat the 32-bit Tegra.

If Nvidia comes out with a Tegra K2 by next year with a 20nm, energy efficient Maxwell GPU, I will be very impressed to see what that can benchmark.

 

[Jurgis Andrijauskas]

playing world of tanks on nvidia tablet i get 50fps+ which are unstable and screen has like 250ms response, in other hand i have ipad air which has decent 60fps and no input lag

 

[Evan Leclair]

Sure the nexus 9 is beat by the ipad air 2, but the shield tablet had more powerful version of the k1 than the nexus. Idk why, but it does. In benchmarks, the shield is the inly one to beat the ipad air 2

 

[CraigN]

False. The Nexus 9 has a more powerful K1. It has the 64-bit Denver.

The Shield only has the 32-bit K1.

http/www.anandtech.com/show/8670/google-nexus-9-preliminary-findings/

Granted, the Shield seems to leverage it's 32-bit K1 better than the N9 in some areas, this could be due to lack of optimization for the Denver K1's unique architecture in Android 5.0. GPU wise, they're identical, but the CPU is faster than the Shield in most areas, with some anomalies. This again can be contributed to whether or not Android is utilizing the Denver K1 properly, or if the benchmarks leverage the 64-bit in Android as well as it does iOS.

On an entirely separate note, I have no idea why this thread keeps getting revived. It's four months old. Move on guys.

 

[woohoot]

I own both the iPAD AIR 2 and the Nvidia Shield Tablet. I've been an android user for the last 5yrs of my life. I've used apple products before but never jumped on the apple bandwagon until now..

The Shield (currently: lollipop 5.0.1) is a good unit graphically but suffers from MAJOR development problems. It gets laggy when swapping between apps, has intermittent WiFi connection problems, and still loses app icons on the home screens each time you turn your tablet on and off. Yes, it does beat the iPAD graphically and offers the benefits of android open development but its not refined. Also, as a ergonomic issue, the power and volume buttons terribly designed are hard to maneuver as they're very recessed on the side of the unit.

As far screen resolution, the ipad seems a tiny bit smoother and cleaner. This is not saying the shield's screen is bad, its pretty darn good, its just not as good as the ipad. Its not a deal breaker however...

So price vs what you get? If you're ok dealing with the buggy system, some iffy ergonomics but has has good potential to be powerhouse in the future, the Shield is a good buy. As much as this hurts me to say this, the ipad is just a better designed unit.

 

[Murissokah]

False. The Nexus 9 has a more powerful K1. It has the 64-bit Denver.

The Shield only has the 32-bit K1.

This would be a good topic for discussion. The Tegra K1 64 'denver' is a dual-core 64-bit 2.5GHz CPU. The Tegra K1 32 'Logan' is a quad-core 2.3GHz with an extra "battery saver" companion core for light tasks.

The fact that one is 64 and the other 32 bears about zero impact in performance. The main reason for a 64-bit SOC is supporting the ARMv8 instruction set, which in turn is quite relevant performance-wise. ARMv8 supports out-of-order execution, which can bring a reasonable performance gain by optimizing the execution queue.

Now the real difference between the two, is that 'Denver' is what Nvidia calls 7-way-superscalar, thanks to ARMv8s support of this feature. It means the processor can take up to 7 instructions per clock, which I assume is a lot more than the ARM Cortex-A15 can, given the dual-core 'Denver' is twice as big as the 'Logan' quad-core while sporting the same node size. Nvidia likes to refer to the chip as the supah chip.

As far as I know, the 192-core Kepler GPU is exactly the same in both chips.

NOTE: Reading the text, I felt like I had to state that the K1 is not really capable of out-of-order execution, but actually has a dynamic code optimization cache, which essentially caches the most used instructions to this in-chip memory. The benefits are similar, but OoOE requires a lot more silicon.

NOTE2: dammit, just realized the threadcromancy. Sorry, guys.

 

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