Benchmark comparison for Jetson Nano, TX2, Xavier NX and AGX

4 min readOct 22, 2019

NVIDIA has released a series of Jetson hardware modules for embedded applications. NVIDIA® Jetson is the world’s leading embedded platform for image processing and DL/AI tasks. Its high-performance, low-power computing for deep learning and computer vision makes it the ideal platform for mobile compute-intensive projects.

We’ve developed an Image & Video Processing SDK for NVIDIA Jetson hardware. Here we present performance benchmarks for the available Jetson modules. As an image processing pipeline, we consider a basic camera application as a good example for benchmarking.

Hardware features for Jetson Nano, TX2, Xavier NX and AGX Xavier

Here we present a brief comparison for Jetsons hardware features to see the progress and variety of mobile solutions from NVIDIA. These units are aimed at different markets and tasks.

Table 1. Hardware comparison for Jetson modules

In camera applications, we can usually hide Host-to-Device transfers by implementing GPU Zero Copy or by overlapping GPU copy/compute. Device-to-Host transfers can be hidden via copy/compute overlap.

Hardware and software for benchmarking

CPU/GPU NVIDIA Jetson Nano, TX2, Xavier NX and AGX Xavier
OS L4T (Ubuntu 18.04)
CUDA Toolkit 10.2 for Jetson Nano, TX2, Xavier NX and AGX Xavier
Fastvideo SDK 0.16.4

NVIDIA Jetson Comparison: Nano vs TX2 vs Xavier NX vs AGX Xavier

For these NVIDIA Jetson modules, we’ve done performance benchmarking for the following standard image processing tasks which are specific for camera applications: white balance, demosaic (debayer), color correction, resize, JPEG encoding, etc. That’s not the full set of Fastvideo SDK features, but it’s just an example to see what kind of performance we could get from each Jetson. You can also choose a particular debayer algorithm and output compression (JPEG or JPEG2000) for your pipeline.

Table 2. GPU kernel times for 2K image processing (1920×1080, 16 bits per channel, milliseconds)

Total processing time is calculated for the values from the gray rows of the table. This is done to show the maximum performance benchmarks for a specified set of image processing modules which correspond to real-life camera applications.

Each Jetson module was run with maximum performance

MAX-N mode for Jetson AGX Xavier
15W for Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson TX2
10W for Jetson Nano

Here we’ve compared just the basic set of image processing modules from Fastvideo SDK to let Jetson developers evaluate the expected performance before building their imaging applications. Image processing from RAW to RGB or RAW to JPEG are standard tasks, and now developers can get detailed info about expected performance for the chosen pipeline according to the table above. We haven’t tested Jetson H.264 and H.265 encoders and decoders in that pipeline. As soon as H.264 and H.265 encoders are working at the hardware level, encoding can be done in parallel with CUDA code, so we should be able to get even better performance.

We’ve done the same kernel time measurements for NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro GPUs. Here you can get the document with the benchmarks.

Software for Jetson performance comparison

We’ve released the software for a GPU-based camera application on GitHub, and it’s available to download both binaries and source codes for our gpu camera sample project. It’s implemented for Windows 7/10, Linux Ubuntu 18.04 and L4T. Apart from a full image processing pipeline on GPU for still images from SSD and for live camera output, there are options for streaming and for glass-to-glass (G2G) measurements to evaluate real latency for camera systems on Jetson. The software currently works with machine vision cameras from XIMEA, Basler, JAI, Matrix Vision, Daheng Imaging, etc.

To check the performance of Fastvideo SDK on a laptop/desktop/server GPU without any programming, you can download Fast CinemaDNG Processor software with GUI for Windows or Linux. That software has a Performance Benchmarks window, and there you can see timing for each stage of image processing. This is a more sofisticated method of performance testing, because the image processing pipeline in that software can be quite advanced, and you can test any module you need. You can also perform various tests on images with different resolutions to see how much the performance depends on image size, content and other parameters.