Under the hood, things are well managed by an unusual Nvidia Tegra K1 chip – it certainly makes a difference from all the Snapdragon CPU's that most devices feature. Alongside this is the usual 2GB RAM.
It is certainly a powerful unit, as the benchmarks will attest. Before that, though, we look at how the device performs in the real world, with everyday usage.
The Nexus 9 will not let you down in that area. The Tegra K1 ploughed through extensive multi-tasking, with the Nexus remaining very responsive despite having several apps open and running in the background. Games, too, were comfortably managed – Temple Run 2 on the highest quality settings displayed no sign of lag or stuttering.
To come to the benchmarks then, the Nexus 9 also proved very adept here. In Geekbench 3, it scored a huge 1962 for single-core performance, with 3373 the multi-core score. This comfortably beat the iPad Air's scores, which posted 1465 and 2643 respectively.
In the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test, it also did very well, scoring 24473. Again, this is a way ahead of the iPad Air on 21651.