[Nexus S General] Zunex95:
Hey people!

This afternoon I got bored so I decided to find myself the best ROM and to learn so Nexus S history. I've tried everything so I'll just go thru from 2.3 to 4.2. Not just performance wise but with design, smoothness and speed. Hope It'll be useful I had fun doing it! Let me clear that I put the ROMs I liked the most in each Android version! Except Jelly Bean 4.1. In every version I'll just start with raw numbers in apps and games then UI, browsing and usability along with design. I'll post Antutu scores in a zip file at the end of the post.

Let's kick off with Gingerbread then. I'm putting Pure Bionic from Team Whiskey helped by Morfic's Trinity kernel at 1,32 ghz.

Antutu score: 4945 (OMG)

Avarage FPS in Modern Combat 4: 47

Avarage FPS in Backstab HD: 52

UI speed and design: Very simple nothing fancy just how I remembered. But the phone is damn responsive. Instant navigating, no lag at all but I just can't feel the smootness of 4.x.

Browser experince: Very fast loading time but laggy scrolling as expected. Without hardware acceleration It's just a half armed goliath.

Overall, Gingerbread (with Bionix) is lighning fast but you have to sacrifice everything fancy. If you're using your phone for gaming and you don't care about fancy UI then I'ts your best choice I assume. Or If you need a phone which reacts instantly that's it. I can't recommend it for every day use.

Let's go on the Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich. Bugless Beast latest release with trinity kernel at 1,32 ghz.

Antutu score: 3634 (maybe because of the GPU, I ran it several times, just could not get more than 3600 pts)

Avarage FPS in Modern Combat 4: 32

Avarage FPS in Backstab HD: 39

UI speed and design: It feel like It's a hybrid between 4.1 and 2.3. I can feel It' smoother but definitely not as fast as GB. Let me clear that none of the roms felt laggy, I'm just compairing them. It looks way more better but.. for the cost of performance.

Browser experince: Finally HW ACC! Way more smoother than GB. Avarage loading time, not a big deal, but very much usable.

4.0 was a great start. New UI and a feel of smoothness, but can't really recommend it for anything. Maybe for someone who wants to play games which doesn't run on 4.1+ (lack of RAM even with high bigmem)

And here we are at Android 4.1 my personal best. I'm trying to stay objective. There'll be 2 ROMs. Pure CM10 and Rascarlo's Rasbeanjelly with alpha12 kernel clocked at 1,32 ghz. I'll take a closer look

CM10 scores:

B]Antutu score:[/B] 4337 (seemed real)

Avarage FPS in Modern Combat 4: 44

Avarage FPS in Backstab HD: 47

Rasbeanjelly:

B]Antutu score:[/B] 4825 (big surprise!)

Avarage FPS in Modern Combat 4: 47

Avarage FPS in Backstab HD: 51

UI speed and design: Much more cleaner design and animations. More smoothness thanks to Project Butter. Google somehow removed those annoying "ics lags".

Browser experince: Similar to ICS but with more "butter". Couple of more features and fixes.

Jelly Bean 4.1 is ready for everday use I really recommend it. Only dissapointment is the fact that we need high bigmem and it means we need to kiss goodbye 720 mkv playback. There is a lot of variation. Trinity kernel for gaming. Air kernel without big mem for multi media and last but not least Marmite for everyday use. If Morfic would implement voodoo in his kernel than our multi media and gaming kernel would be the same. (I'd really want that).

And here comes the latest Android 4.2. I can't really judge it because It's still under development and not ready yet. So keep in mind that. I used jellyshot v0.5 with marmite 7.0.4

B]Antutu score:[/B] 4059 (big surprise!)

Avarage FPS in Modern Combat 4: 35

Avarage FPS in Backstab HD: 42

UI speed and design: More user friendly more features. The lockscreen is a bit wierd. If your phone is locked they still can view your email and calender etc etc.. Love the new things.

UIBrowser experience: Very much similar to JB. Nothing really mentional.

As a said and can't really tell what's up with this yet. I say it's not yet comparable. Everything works as it should. New features new ideas and can be used as daily ROM.

At some points I felt myself dumb even writing it down, but I hope I helped someone to decide which Android version you need. I can't really help in deciding which custom rom to use since there are so many features and combinations! Thanks for reading and feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

PS: Sorry for my english, I'm a bit sleepy these days :P

Cheers, Zunex!