Asus Vivo Tab RT Review: Windows RT Takes Flight


Performance: Web-based Testing

Test Methodology:  Unfortunately, this page may be a bit dry and tasteless for you, if you're used to digesting page upon page of performance benchmarks.  The fact of the matter is, there really aren't currently that many ways of benchmarking performance on a Windows RT device currently, other than a couple of web browser-based metrics.  Only Microsoft can run Windows 32 apps on Windows RT currently, like MS Office 13 for example

And of course Android and iOS-based benchmarks are a no-go as well.  With that in mind, we can still run a couple of basic tests, like SunSpider and Rightware BrowserMark.

SunSpider and Rightware BrowserMark Tests
Javascript and Web Browser Testing
SunSpider compares JavaScript processing performance across platforms and various web browser types that utilize JavaScript for web application implementation and development.  "This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples... they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered."

 

In SunSpider, the Windows RT-driven ASUS Vivo Tab RT takes the performance slot versus all other major tablet platforms currently, including iOS and Android.  Even the powerful quad-core Samsung Exynos SoC in the Galaxy Note 10.1 doesn't quite keep up with Android Ice Cream Sandwich on board.  We should note, although not quite Apples-to-Apples (no pun intended), the iPhone 5's A6 SoC and iOS 6 do outpace Windows RT, NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and the Vivo Tab RT here by just a hair at 941.8

Rightware's BrowserMark measures browser performance across JavaScript, HTML5, WebGL, CSS and other languages.  Here the ASUS Vivo Tab RT brings up the rear by a long shot.  It could be that Microsoft and ASUS decided to go with a lower power, slightly slower speed bin version of Tegra 3 here, along with lower power DDR3 memory but we can tell you that web browsing performance in our testing certainly didn't "feel" like the graph above shows.

Unfortunately our benchmark testing with Windows RT right now is a bit on the inconclusive side but we'll return to this in the weeks and months ahead, as new tools and measurements become available to us.


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