NVIDIA SHIELD OTA Update & Performance Review
NVIDIA SHIELD Android Performance
| NVIDIA SHIELD | NVIDIA SHIELD | Verizon Ellipsis 7 | Google Nexus 7 | Haier Digital2 D2-961G | |
| Android Version | 4.4.2 | 4.3 | 4.2.2 | 4.4.2 | 4.2.2 |
| Antutu | 38280 | 39069 | 13291 | 21034 | 10176 |
| Quadrant 2.1.1 | 18289 | 18431 | 4822 | 5551 | 7778 |
| SunSpider 1.0.2 | 519.7ms | 518.2ms | 1446.3ms | 1004.5ms | 2434.1ms |
| BrowserMark 2.0 | 2862 | 3229 | 1313 | 3013 | 1992 |
| 3DMark IceStorm | Maxed out | Maxed out | 3184 | Maxed out | 2276 |
| 3DMark IceStorm Extreme | Maxed out | Maxed out | N/A | 7730 | 1165 |
| 3DMark IceStorm Unlimited | 16347 | 16407 | 10845 | ||
| Vellamo Metal | 1222 | 1231 | 446 | 765 | 274 |
| CF-Bench | 76274 | 40549 | 12921 | 15009 | 11096 |
| GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex Onscreen | 1973(35.2FPS) | 1964(35.1FPS) | 265(4.7FPS) | 844(15.1FPS) | 479(8.6FPS) |
| GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex Offscreen | 1272(22.7FPS) | 1270(22.7FPS) | 153(2.7FPS) | 916(16.4FPS) | 501(4.1FPS) |
| BaseMark X | 20945 | 20806 | 963 | 13059 | 2566 |
| Higher Scores are better in all but SunSpider, Lower is better there | |||||
It wasn’t exactly a surprise that the NVIDIA SHIELD pretty well tore apart the competition. After all the SHIELD is designed to be a mobile gaming system with an NVIDIA Tegra 4 core processor and the tablets are mobile devices that you can game on. The closest competition for the SHIELD was the Google Nexus 7 and even that didn’t hold a candle to the SHIELD in any of the tests. I was able to get the latest over the air update on the shield a couple days early so we tested the SHIELD with Android 4.3 and the latest version of Android Kit Kat 4.4.2. Many of the benchmarks between the two versions of Android were pretty close, however there was a certain consistency between the scores. On six of the ten benchmarks used, the SHIELD running KitKat saw a slight drop in performance. For the most part it was a difference in the realm of 1%-2%, though BrowserMark 2.0 saw a drop of ~11% while our other browser benchmark SunSpider 1.0.2 was a negligible (less than .1%) difference between the two. 3DMark IceStorm was virtually a wash between the two versions of Android as well, the SHIELD running 4.4.2 was 60 3DMarks or .37% behind the Shield running Jelly Bean (4.3). CF-Bench saw a huge increase in score over Jelly Bean. The SHIELD running Jelly Bean scored 40,549 and the updated SHIELD running 4.4.2 increased to 75987! That’s an increase of 87.4% between the two Android versions!