Dual Core Snapdragon GPU Performance Explored - 1.5 GHz MSM8660 and Adreno 220 Benchmarks
by Brian Klug on March 30, 2011 4:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Adreno
- MSM8660
- MDP
- Mobile
GLBenchmark 2.0
GLBenchmark 2.0 – as its name implies – tests OpenGL ES 2.0 performance on compatible devices across multiple software platforms. The suite includes two long benchmarking scenarios with a demanding combination of OpenGL ES 2.0 effects - texture based and direct lighting, bump, environment, and radiance mapping, soft shadows, vertex shader based skinning, level of detail support, multi-pass deferred rendering, noise textures, and ETC1 texture compression. In addition, there's a large suite of subtests and feature tests.
GLBenchmark 2.0 is the best example of an even remotely current 3D game running on this class of hardware–even then this is a bit of a stretch. GLBenchmark 2.0 is still our current go-to test as it is our best best for guaging real world performance, even across different mobile OSes. Keep in mind that with GLBenchmark 2.0 we still cannot run at any resolution than native – in this case 800x480 (WVGA) – and the same applies for other devices in the suite, they're all at respective native resolutions. GLBenchmark 3.0 will fix this somewhat with the ability to render into an off-screen buffer of arbitrary size.
We never formally reviewed the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G, but have one nonetheless and have included it in our benchmark numbers a few times. Likewise, I purchased an HTC Inspire 4G for personal use which we'll review soon. The importance of these two devices is that they represent the current generation of single-core Snapdragon SoCs with Adreno 205 graphics. Comparatively, the 1.5 GHz MSM8660 with Adreno 220 is 2.2x faster than the 1 GHz MSM8655 with Adreno 205.
Interestingly enough our run through Egypt came slightly higher with Vsync on than it did off - we're just showing the margin of error here.
Pro is a less challenging test than Egypt, as it's simply the GLBenchmark 1.x main suite with OpenGL ES 2.0 features and shaders. Already we're at the framerate cap here on both MSM8660 and likely OMAP 4430. Pro likewise demonstrates huge gains from Adreno 205 to Adreno 220 - in this case 3.7x.
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Brian Klug - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
There's no auto brightness option in the display brightness dialog box, at least on this build. I'm not entirely certain whether it's absent however. Is there some better way to check?-Brian
Mike1111 - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Not true, there is a Motorola Xoom in the first Quadrant Benchmark.Brian Klug - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Oops, I had the results correct but didn't regenerate the graph after fixing things. Should be right now.-Brian
Exelius - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
It's not really ironic that the prototype is running a newer version of android than most retail phones are. That's kind of the idea of a prototype. Companies have no incentive to update android on their phones after they're released, so that shouldn't come as a shock at all.metafor - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
A lot of things aren't really ironic.Like rain on your wedding day or a free ride that you bought anyway.
Doesn't stop people from calling it ironic though.
nermie - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Choosing lines from a song called "Ironic" as an example of things that aren't ironic is pretty ironic.metafor - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
No more ironic than a song called "Ironic" that contains nothing that's ironic.marc1000 - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
this is really a lot of irony... =Dmetafor - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
I believe the MDP comes with a plethora of profilers and hardware plugs available to software. One of these measure aggregate power/current and graphs it. It'd be interesting to see how much power the SoC is eating during CPU and/or GPU intensive tests.Since other devices don't have these profilers, there wouldn't be much in the way of comparing but having absolute numbers would be interesting in and of itself.
efeman - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Performance is getting pretty impressive. I still don't see using my phone as a true mobile gaming platform in the near future; the battery life just doesn't cut it when I need the phone for actual phone uses. I wonder if they'll ever drop down smartphone battery drain enough (or develop insanely better batteries) to allow for this kind of usage for extended periods of time.