HTC One X flexes its Tegra 3 muscles in our benchmark tests

The HTC One X and the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core chip aim to start a new chapter in the smartphone performance books. Being the first quad-core chipset in a handset, Tegra 3 faces extremely high expectations and we were as curious as you are to find out if it will live up to them.

So we ran a bunch of benchmark apps on the One X and we are rushing to give you the results, garnished with our findings. To put its results into perspective we compared them to some of the best dual-core droids, the Exynos inside Samsung Galaxy S II, the TI OMAP making the Samsung Galaxy Nexus tick and the Snapdragon powering the HTC Sensation XE.

With two times the core count of its competitors and the same Cortex-A9 architecture (the Sensation XE even uses Scorpion cores, which are even less powerful), it’s no surprise the HTC One X blows the Galaxy S II, Galaxy Nexus and the Sensation XE out of the water on CPU-stressing benchmarks.

BenchmarkPi

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  408 ms
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  452 ms
• HTC Sensation XE
  583 ms
• HTC One X
  338 ms

Linpack

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  77.1
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  77.6
• HTC Sensation XE
  50.4
• HTC One X
  126.1

Quadrant (ICS friendly version)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  2116
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  3976
• HTC One X
  4574

The second generation ULP GeForce GPU did quite well too, allowing the One X to perform admirably in the NenaMark 2 challenge. The Galaxy S II did beat it by a small margin here, but you shouldn’t forget that it has less than half the pixel count of the One X HD screen. The Galaxy Nexus, which has resolution identical to that of the HTC flagship couldn’t come anywhere near to matching its performance.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  24
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  51.6
• HTC Sensation XE
  23
• HTC One X
  47.5

In fact the only place where the powerful chipset inside the One X didn’t quite show its potential were the browser-based benchmarks. We suspect they didn’t have proper support for the four CPU cores, as the scores achieved by the new HTC top dog here were about identical to those of the Galaxy duo. The Sensation XE does lag behind here, but that’s mostly due to the Gingerbread browser – its scores improve drastically with the ICS update.

SunSpider 0.9.1

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  1863
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  1849
• HTC Sensation XE
  4404
• HTC One X
  1757

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  103591
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  111853
• HTC Sensation XE
  72498
• HTC One X
  96803

While you are waiting for the in-depth review, make sure to check out our latest hands-on of the HTC One X.