The new iPad is out and it is gorgeous. That Retina display screen is going to make apps look stunning on the device. All of that screen real estate can’t take all of the credit though. The new iPad’s A5X chip makes it all possible with a dual-core processor and quad-core GPU on board.

At the new iPad announcement, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the new A5X chip would outperform Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip for Android tablets. The Tegra 3 is a quad-core processor and is capable of some pretty awesome 3D effects. It’s time to pit the two against each other to see if Cook was telling the truth.

The fine people at Laptop Mag ran the GLBenchmark 2.1 on both the new iPad and a Transformer Prime tablet using the Tegra 3 processor. On the standard test, the new iPad processed 6,718 frames at a rate of 60 FPS. The Nvidia Tegra 3, on the same test, only processed 5,939 frames at 53 FPS. It’s not a huge difference, but the new iPad is definitely the victor.

The next test saw the two processors duke it out with Geekbench, a tool that measures raw processing power. Here’s where the Tegra 3 really excels with an overall score of 1,571. The A5X on the new iPad only scored 692.

When testing the power of processors, one can not leave out gaming. The test saw the Transformer Prime and the new iPad both running two different 3D games that push the graphical capabilities of the devices. Long story short: games on the new iPad look stunning due to its screen, but games have more detail on the Transformer Prime. This is due to the games being optimized for the Tegra 3. You should be seeing similar performance out of the A5X once games are built with it in mind.

Here’s a video with side-by-side comparisons of the games running on both devices:

Do you think that the A5X chip is a game changer in mobile computing? Or is it just a small upgrade? Let us know in the comments.

[Lead image: MacLife]