As gaming on Android devices gets better and better, the struggle to find a smartphone or tablet that can handle today’s top tier games with effortless stride continues. When it comes to picking a device that can provide you with the very best in gaming performance on mobile, it can be a little overwhelming to choose from all the options that are available out there. There are a few different things to take into account when you look for a great gaming mobile device, not the least of which is the CPU and GPU chips used by the manufacturers. Screen resolution can help things look better too, but better resolution won’t mean much if the gameplay looks and feels choppy. While real world performance may end up feeling differently for each individual, gaming benchmark tests can help us paint a picture of what to expect from our prospective choices when looking to buy.
Thanks to Futuremark’s 3D Mark benchmark test for Android, we can see what devices from 2014 have come out on top when it comes to GPU performance. The 3D Mark Test ranks Android devices by the 3D Mark Icestorm Unlimited score which focuses more on the GPU performance with having the CPU weigh less on the overall performance score during the test. Unsurprisingly, the top three devices all carry the Nvidia Tegra K1 chips inside of them which are accompanied by the Kepler GPU handling the graphics, albeit the second and first devices on the ranking list are carrying the Tegra K1 32-bit ARM Cortex-A15 with a Kepler GPU, and the third on the list, the HTC Nexus 9 is powered by the Nvidia Tegra K1 64-bit dual-core ARM Denver with a Kepler GPU. We’d have thought the Nexus 9 would have come out ahead of the Xiaomi Mi Pad, but according to the 3D Mark test it falls just a little bit short of the second spot for GPU performance. You can see the entire list from one to ten in the image above, and the full list of devices scored on the test can be found here at this link.