Kobo Arc GPU Benchmark Results

As games become a bigger market, mobile GPU performance will become increasingly more relevent. Users will expect the games they buy to run smoothly and look beautiful. Benchmark Reviews will be using GFXBench 2.7.2 and 3Dmark Ice Storm. Both of these benchmarks push the GPU of a system much harder than games will providing a worst case scenario for any system.

GFXBench 2.7.2 T-Rex HD benchmark runs on Android, iOS, and all Windows platforms. This benchmark allows enthusiasts to directly compare disparate systems. On Android and iOS it is testing OpenGL ES 2.0 performance, while on Windows 8, Phone, and RT it tests the DirectX performance of a system. The number given is the number of frames that the benchmark was able to render before the end of the test.

3DMark known for their series of Window’s based benchmarks, has created a new benchmark designed to be cross platform. The benchmark known as Ice Storm is a series of tests designed to test a systems graphics and physics performance of Mobile Devices. We run this benchmark on the extreme setting, which pushes texture and post-processing to their highest levels while rendering this benchmark at 1920 x 1080. This allows us to test systems with dissimilar resolutions against each other without having the results skewed by some of the ultra-high resolution displays available on tablets.

Kobo uses a PowerVR SGX 544 on the Arc. This mobile GPU runs at 384MHz and should be able to process 12.3GFLOPS of data, on the other hand its competition the Galaxy S3 which runs a Adreno 225 at 400MHz is able to process 25.6GFLOPS of data, exactly twice as much. Throughout our benchmarks this shows with our Kobo Arc unable to catch up to the raw power of the Galaxy S3.

On our GFXBench tests the Kobo Arc scored a respectable 311 on the onscreen test and 173 on the 1080P offscreen test. Although not as good as the Galaxy S3 when we check the scores on GFXBench’s website we see that this is comparable to the Nexus 7’s score of 185.

The 3DMark test is even less friendly than GFXBench to the Kobo Arc with it scoring nearly 1/2 the score the Galaxy S3. This makes sense since the Galaxy S3 has a GPU with nearly twice the raw horsepower of the Kobo Arc. Still, the score 1803 is within spitting distance of the Nexus 7, and in my experience perfectly adequate for gaming.