Talk about real world gaming performance. Today I get the chance to Play Modern Combat 4 on Nexus 4 and it was running smooth but I noticed some effects were missing at the start up screen as well as in game effect. On the other hand I have the same game on Note 2 which it also runs smooth but with all those effects that are missing on Nexus 4 gaming. Developers turn off effect some for the devices which can not handle those effect. If you want I can give you the video links.
Some days back I played Nova 3 on Nexus 4 which it was running smooth but again some effect were missing like Depth of Field etc. Whereas Note 2 has those effects and still runs the game even smoother. Nova 3 was specially updated for Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 back in november and it was not a matter of none optimized game.
You can not deny the real world performance. In games Note 2 does exhibit better performance which says something. Where note 2 shows better result in benchmark people say that benchmark is not optimized for 4.2 (although it is updated for 4.2) and where Nexus 4 shows better result i.e. GPU they do not say that the benchmark is not optimized for android 4.2
They just simply say that Nexus 4 has better GPU. The truth of matter is that Nexus 4 has nice GPU but CPU is not stepped up from before which can support a nice GPU and also the ram is not speedy. I have checked Nexus 4 has dual channel DDR2 ram at 533MHz instead of 1066MHz (source Phone Arena website). I hope now you get it why Nexus 4 does not get good score in ram as well.