A few weeks ago, I presented in an article the response times of Retina Displays in iPhone terminals, they being the fastest touch screens on the market. The same is true in the case of iPad tablets, they respond the fastest to the commands given to users, the same company giving us information regarding their response times. If you look at the image above, you will notice that iPad Mini has the lowest response time to commands, only 75 ms, followed by iPad 4 with 81 ms and of Nvidia Shield with 92ms.
In a result that's perhaps now unsurprising, the iOS devices are more responsive than its competitors. Interestingly, the iPad mini – with its smaller screen and 1024×768 resolution – performs similarly to the larger fourth generation iPad and its 2048×1536 resolution, suggesting that responsiveness is not reduced by the larger screen size or resolution. Our previous speculations continue to apply – more responsive devices may process touches earlier in the stack, poll for touches more frequently or have touchscreens optimized or calibrated to be more responsive. In our latest review of our test apps, we discovered an optimization that suggests that the GPU or GPU drivers in the devices might also add significant latency.
Right after the Nvidia product we find Microsoft Surface RT-, at a considerable distance ranking Kindle Fire HDthen Google Nexus 7 and the last tablet in the list is Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0, having a response time more than 2 times higher than that of the iPad Mini and iPad 4. The results of this test give us an explanation for the lag that Android tablets have when using them, all 3 tablets having response of over 100 ms, and in the case of the Samsung tablet we are talking about a not very great user experience.
To obtain these results, the people from Agawi used a camera that recorded images at 240 frames per second, together with a device called Touchscope.
