“As always, our good friends over at Kishonti managed to have the first GPU performance results for the new 4th generation iPad,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech. “Although the new iPad retains its 2048 x 1536 ‘Retina’ display, Apple claims a 2x improvement in GPU performance through the A6X SoC. The previous generation chip, the A5X, had two ARM Cortex A9 cores running at 1GHz paired with four PowerVR SGX 543 cores running at 250MHz. The entire SoC integrated 4 x 32-bit LPDDR2 memory controllers, giving the A5X the widest memory interface on a shipping mobile SoC in the market at the time of launch.”

“A quick look at the GLBenchmark results for the new iPad 4 tells us all we need to know. The A6X moves to a newer GPU core: the PowerVR SGX 554,” Lal Shimpi reports. “Normalize to the same resolution and we see that the new PowerVR graphics setup is 57% faster than even ARM’s Mali-T604 in the Nexus 10. Once again we’re seeing just about 2x the performance of the previous generation iPad.”

Lal Shimpi reports, “Ultimately it looks like the A6X is the SoC that the iPad needed to really deliver good gaming performance at its native resolution. I would not be surprised to see more game developers default to 2048 x 1536 on the new iPad rather than picking a lower resolution and enabling anti-aliasing. The bar has been set for this generation…”

Read more, and see the benchmarks, in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "User" for the heads up.]