TI's OMAP 4430: Hey, I Remember You
A quick glance down at the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1's spec sheet should make it clear that this tablet wasn't designed to break performance records. One generation ago, Samsung used Nvidia's Tegra 2. This time around, the company is leaning on an older and slower Texas Instruments OMAP 4430, used in more budget-oriented tablets like Amazon's Kindle Fire (The Amazon Kindle Fire: Benchmarked, Tested, And Reviewed).With tablets like the low-priced Nexus 7 featuring a much more powerful Tegra 3, hardware's impact on overall performance is more important than ever to explore.
| GeekBench Scores | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Asus Transformer Pad (TF300T) | Google Nexus 7 | Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 |
| SoC | Tegra 3 (T30L) | Tegra 3 (T30L) | OMAP 4430 |
| Android | 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), Performance Profile | 4.1 (Jelly Bean) | 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) |
| Overall | 1534 | 1527 | 912 |
| Integer | 1380 | 1298 | 750 |
| Floating Point | 2231 | 2288 | 1298 |
| Memory | 1214 | 1222 | 853 |
According to GeekBench, the OMAP 4430 is significantly slower than Tegra 3, a fact that show in real-world use. We had a hard time achieving smooth playback of high-def video, and the user interface feels laggier than the Tegra 3-based devices we've tested.
| GLBenchmark 2.1.4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Asus Transformer Pad (TF300T) | Google Nexus 7 | Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 |
| Egypt Standard | 5752 frames (51 FPS) | 5968 frames (53 FPS) | 2042 frames (18 FPS) |
| Egypt Fixed | 62.768 s (45 FPS) | 59.279 s (48 FPS) | 166.206 s (17 FPS) |
| Egypt Off-Screen (720p) | 7178 frames (64 FPS) | 7073 frames (63 FPS) | 3125 frames (28 FPS) |
| Pro Standard | 2796 frames (56 FPS) | 2830 frames (57 FPS) | 1259 frames (25 FPS) |
| Pro Fixed | 22.982 s (54 FPS) | 22.515 s (56 FPS) | 54.359 s (23 FPS) |
| Pro Off-Screen (720p) | 4006 frames (80 FPS) | 4095 frames (82 FPS) | 2257 frames (45 FPS) |
| Fill Rate | 469.066688 Mtexels/sec | 467.571264 Mtexels/s | 227.812 Mtexels/s |
Drilling down into the GPU using GLBenchmark delivers more bad news for Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. Simply, it's just lacking. The standardized off-screen tests, which are designed to take resolution out of the equation, indicate that Tegra 3 serves up nearly twice the graphics horsepower.
That'd probably be more of a problem, except that most of the best-looking games are exclusive to Tegra 3-based devices anyway. They're automatically made unavailable when accessing Google Play on a device based on a different SoC. You can get tricky and force their installation by backing up from another tablet. However, the outcome is less than stellar, as we discovered in our Kindle Fire review.
Running Sprinkle on the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, for example, results in water effects that are incorrectly rendered.