Tegra 2 vs Desktop GPUs

Thanks for the info. I wasn't expecting there to be an easy or accurate way of comparing them as I know tegra 2 is only used in phones and tablets but it would be interesting to see what people think anyway

Interesting question, I was wondering the same thing. I've seen a lot of articles exalting 'console quality graphics' in recent times (not specifically aimed at Tegra, just many of the soon-to-be-released ARM based SoCs). I think we have a little ways to go yet before claims like those can be made, but without any solid information this is only my opinion.

It is my understanding that the Tegra 2 GPU has its roots in its desktop counterparts. As far as how it stacks up against these desktop GPUs I don't know, I can only speculate. I do know (thanks to a very comprehensive article on AnandTech) that Tegra 2 appears to have 4 vertex shaders and 4 pixel shaders, and they operate at 300 MHz. After a quick look at Wikipedia's article comparing nVidia's GPU specs it looks to me like the closest match would be the GeForceFX 5200. The Tegra 2 has a claimed triangle throughput of ~33 million/sec (seen a lot of different numbers) and the GeForce FX 5200 has a real world ~16 million/sec (so my guess is probably not too different in real life). I do not know how the feature sets stack, though (I know the 5200 is a DX9 class part thus supports those associated features, and the Tegra 2 GPU is an OpenGL ES 2.0 part, however while I know specifically what features the DX9 classification encompasses, I really have no idea what features the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification actually covers).

Since this is all speculation, I'd really like to hear from someone with more knowledge on the matter. Since most of us are familiar with desktop GPUs, it would be really cool (and helpful) to know how these new mobile parts stack up (both performance and feature wise)