Wondering how the Verizon Galaxy Nexus will handle all the high-end games that are coming out and taking advantage of super-powered Android hardware? Well wonder no more. Chris Burns over at SlashGear took his shiny new Nexus on a gaming bender, trying out two high-profile 3D games that are quickly becoming the standard for Android graphics: third-person shooter ShadowGun and jet ski racer Riptide GP.

The results are impressive, to say the least. Despite the Galaxy Nexus’ 720p resolution, both games run quickly and smoothly at the highest settings. On ShadowGun you can notice minimal slowdown during screen-filling effects, but that’s about it. When playing Riptide, the racing is incredibly smooth and fluid even with the multiple water effects at play. Notice that in both titles, the virtual buttons on the Galaxy Nexus don’t disappear like they do with active videos – this may be a limitation of the APIs in question, or it could be adressed by future releases of either game.

Check out the videos below:

Of course, neither game looks as good as it does on the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, but that’s to be expected. The quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor combines with a slightly lower system load for Honeycomb as opposed to Ice Cream Sandwich, and Riptide GP has a special version designed specifically to take advantage of the hardware. But there’s no doubt about it: the Galaxy Nexus is one of the best Android smartphones out there for gaming, if not the best at the moment. We’ll see how long it can keep its crown when Tegra 3 smartphones from HTC and others start arriving in Q1 of 2012.