Acer Predator 8 review – the Nvidia Shield Tablet rival

Performance and Battery Life

The Acer Predator 8 isn’t the first Android tablet geared specifically towards gaming; the Nvidia Shield Tablet and the more recent Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 iteration both took a similar tilt. Acer, however, has used a quad-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom X7-Z8700 processor that can turbo to 2.4GHz and has integrated Intel HD Graphics.

Head-to-head with Nvidia’s Tegra K1 and Kepler SMX GPU pairing, it doesn’t quite hold up. This is first evident when comparing the two tablet’s Peacekeeper browser scores. At 1,002 it sits behind the K1’s 1,148. Similarly its Geekbench scores were eclipsed by the K1, managing 1,024 and 3,230 in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. These are compared to the Shield Tablet K1’s 1,142 and 3,554 in the same tests.

Similarly, when it came to gaming performance it fell behind, too. In our GFXBench GL Manhattan tests it managed just 1,141 (18fps) in the onscreen test and 1,171 (19fps) in the offscreen test. These are poor compared to the Kepler SMX’s performance of 1,801 (29fps) and 1,961 (32fps) in the same tests. Simply put, Intel’s processor can’t hold its own against Nvidia’s.

The Predator 8 pales where it comes to battery life, too, managing 9 hours 55 minutes to the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1’s 12 hours 39 minutes. In terms of storage, you get 32GB, which is very generous for the price. On top of that, there’s a microSD card for easy expansion although slightly annoyingly the slot is exposed on the side without a cover.

TacSense and Android Customisations

Still, when it came to how responsive Android 5.1 felt, it still felt nippy enough. Lollipop’s animations transitioned quickly and apps opened with suitable haste. Acer has packed in two haptic motors into the Predator 8, which provides some vibration feedback when tapping menus, navigating Android and using the keyboard, similar to how most Android smartphones perform. Its real use, however, is supposed to be for gaming in order to provide some force feedback for games.

It doesn’t work with all games, however. Asphalt 8 comes pre-installed and has haptic feedback support so you can feel your nitro boosts and collisions but it doesn’t really add anything to the experience. On top of that, Asphalt 8 doesn’t play completely smoothly on the Predator 8, with occasional jerkiness, so it was a strange game to include.

In truth, I couldn’t find any other games that utilised the vibration motors, which Acer has called TacSense. High profile games you might expect to have vibration, like Dead Trigger, didn’t generate a peep out of the motors. Popular casual games like Candy Crush Saga, which might have benefitted from a little extra excitement, likewise didn’t generate any feedback. The vibration motors, then, only felt useful for the nice level of feedback from the onscreen keyboard that I often missed transitioning from an Android smartphone to a tablet.

One annoyance is the amount of pre-installed apps and shortcuts to app installations that come with the Predator 8. You have a suite of Acer apps as part of the Iconia Suite and Acer BYOC apps for music and photos. Then there are third party apps like the Amazon Appstore and Booking.com. To top it all off there are shortcuts to install a number of games. They’re not pre-installed and will take you to the Play store to install, but they’re still annoying to have to remove.

There are some useful inclusions, however. EZ Tasking is Acer’s take on multitasking in Android and lets you run two apps side-by-side, with each app resizable, Not all apps are compatible, but the more obvious ones are such as the Gmail, Chrome, YouTube and Hangouts apps. This means you can have a YouTube video playing and fire up a second app without it stopping (or having to have a YouTube Music Key subscription for background playback).

You can even have the other app fullscreen and trick it into continuing to play by dragging the adjustable slider all the way across and choosing that the YouTube app doesn’t actually close and continues playing in the background. Other features return from other Acer tablets including ways to wake it up from sleep with five-finger or two-thumb gestures or capture screenshots with three-finger pinches.

Camera

There’s a 5 megapixel camera on the back with a 2 megapixel front-facing camera. Neither camera is particularly good, however. The rear camera takes a long time to autofocus and produces very noisy, disappointing images that appear soft and lacking in vibrancy. Holding the tablet in landscape also leads to accidentally covering the lens all too often as well.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator 8 does a lot of things well. It’s a good size and weight and feels well made. Its front-facing speakers and display are particularly excellent, making it a great tablet for watching video. As a specific gaming tablet, however, it comes up short. There’s not much there specifically geared towards gamers. The haptic feedback is under-utilised. It has double the storage for the same price as the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 but its actual gaming performance can’t hold a candle.

The Shield Tablet, aside from better performance, also has lots of gamer-friendly additions such as integrated Twitch streaming, controller support and Nvidia’s game streaming options such as GeForce Now and GameStream for your PC (if you have a compatible Nvidia GPU). In the end, the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 is the much better buy even if the Acer Predator 8 is still a decent tablet for the money.