Its a fairly common experience with Augmented Reality – you hear about a great new AR campaign, get hold of the marker image, and fire up the app… only to find it struggles to run smoothly on your handset.

ARworks has decided to put some of the top iOS and Android smartphones to the test, by running its own AR apps on a range of devices, including the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3.

“When a mobile device runs an AR app, processors, cores, memory have to do two very heavy tasks simultaneously,” said ARworks founder and CEO Szabolcs Budahazy. “They have to analyse the live camera picture to find the so-called marker image and at the same time calculate 3D co-ordinates, surfaces, lights, shadows of the usually three-dimensional, animated content. Whats more, since the generated AR content has to be displayed, screens are tested as well.”

Rather unsurprisingly, the iPhone 5 proved significantly quicker loading and running AR content than older iPhone handsets, but when handling 3D content it also beat out the latest iPad and Samsungs Galaxy S3.

You can watch all eight devices being tested in the video below: