ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 Z580CA Intel-Powered Premium Android Tablet Review

by Paul Lilly — Wednesday, September 16, 2015, 11:35 AM EDT

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Performance: GPU

To get a feel for how graphics performance on the ZenPad S 8.0 compares to other devices, we used GFXBench, which has been one of our standard graphics performance benchmarks for a while. In order to ensure V-Sync and resolution isn’t a limiting factor, we compare offscreen test results. We also used Futuremark's 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark.

GFXBench and 3DMark Ice Storm

Android Gaming Benchmarks

ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 GFXBench T-Rex Offscreen

ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 GFXBench Fill Offscreen

The ZenPad S 8.0 tasks gaming and graphics chores to its PowerVR G6430 GPU based on Imagination's Series 6 (Rogue) architecture. It was a potent part when it came out a few years ago, though not powerful enough to put the ZenPad S 8.0 in the same gaming class as the iPad Air 2 or NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet.

ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 3DMark Unlimited

ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 3DMark Unlimited FPS

Once again, we see the ZenPad S 8.0 fall below the top performing tablets and settle comfortably into middle ground. Note that in the FPS graph, we omitted the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet results -- it's a different class of tablet (purpose built for gaming) and its results would skew things, relatively speaking. For the curious, it scored 213.8 frames per second in GT1 and 130.1 frames per second in GT2.

The ZenPad S 8.0 didn't crush the benchmark like the SHIELD TABLET, though on its own, 81.2 frames per second (GT1) and 46 frames per second (GT2) aren't cause for embarrassment at all.