Benchmark Results for NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 Surface

Last week, we discovered that the first Tegra K1-equipped device to come to market would be Xiaomi’s MiPad tablet. That’s due out next month, and despite that, we’ve largely remained oblivious to what kind of performance gains we’ll see over Tegra 4. Paper specs only go so far, but given that after its announcement at CES, NVIDIA touted that K1 was 50% faster than an Xbox 360, it’s been hard to not get excited about its forthcoming release.

Thanks to Chinese tech site Evolife (thanks, PC Perspective), we are getting our first taste of K1 performance with some leaked benchmarks. Overall, performance looks great, especially on the graphics side of things.

In a 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited run, Tegra K1 scored 25,737 – a score that’s 60% faster than what the Tegra 4-equipped NVIDIA SHIELD gets. Given the fact that the K1 has 166% more cores than Tegra 4, that gain in performance could be seen as a little weak; however, there is the chance that benchmarks have not caught up, or that we were too naive in expecting the performance to scale based on the number of cores alone. As it is, K1’s potential is enormous, especially given we’re talking about something that could more than power an Xbox 360 game on a mobile device.

Other benchmarks shared include Antutu, which put the K1 at about 16% faster, BaseMark OS II at 82% faster, and BaseMark X at… deep breath… 191% faster. Well, it seems not all benchmarks can take proper advantage of NVIDIA’s much-improved Tegra, after all.