Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G Performance Report: First Taste of the Snapdragon 780G

GPU Performance & Power

The GPU on the Snapdragon 780 is interesting – Qualcomm calls it an Adreno 642, and had promised performance increases over +50% compared to the Snapdragon 768G. This latter chip wasn’t employed as much, but it had promised +15% increases over the 765G. The combined math of the two generations should signify that the Snapdragon 780G should be around +72% faster than the Snapdragon 765G. It’s also interesting that Qualcomm called the GPU an Adreno 642 which is a larger numerical jump from the Adreno 620 of the previous generations – we asked ourselves how this would position itself against the Adreno 640 of the Snapdragon 855 flagship from a few years back.

Starting off with Basemark GPU, we’re off to a good start with peak performance increases of +50% versus the Xiaomi Mi 10 Lite 5G with the Snapdragon 765G.

As a note, these results also include updated performance numbers of the Pixel 5 which features the same S765G chipset; Google’s latest April patch seems to have finally (after 6 months….) resolved the crippling GPU performance behaviour which the device suffered from since launch.

In GFXBench Aztec high, the performance increases are much higher, with the Mi 11 Lite 5G showcasing a +107% performance boost versus its predecessor, which is quite astounding.

Looking at power and power efficiency between the two generations, we’re seeing that the new chip roughly uses +80% power versus the S765G, and because the performance increase is larger than the power increase, there’s a perf/W increase in efficiency as well.

The figures in Aztec Normal showcase a similar story: Almost double the peak performance at roughly +80% power.

The generational comparisons here are interesting, and indeed the Adreno 642 of the Snapdragon 780 here lands ahead of the Adreno 640 of the Snapdragon 855, both in performance, as well as lower power, for a much higher efficiency. It’s actually comparable to the Snapdragon 865 from last year.

The Manhattan 3.1 figures are both equivalent in the performance and power increases at around +77% - with efficiency roughly staying flat because of that. It’s to be noted that this is still extremely impressive as usually performance increases of such a degree come with efficiency hits – however the new GPU and process node are doing their job to keep the efficiency high.

Finally, in T-Rex, the performance has also gone up by +60%. This is a workload that we expect to be more fill-rate bound by now, but the fact that the new SoC is able to manage such a larger boost even though it retains the exact same LPDDR4X-2133 2x16b memory interface is again quite impressive – it’s actually faster and more efficient than the flagship Exynos 2100 when it has to throttle down after prolonged periods.

Extremely Large Performance Boosts

In general, the GPU of the Snapdragon 780 is extremely impressive due to the fact how large a boost it makes in comparison to the Snapdragon 765G last year. I admit, we were never really too convinced about the S765G performance as it really only matched quite old flagship SoCs such as the Snapdragon 835.

The new Snapdragon 780 essentially jumps a few generations, and you can essentially expect to outperform Snapdragon 855 flagships, falling short of the Snapdragon 865 devices of last year.

Qualcomm was able to achieve this through a big increase in the power usage of the GPU. The Snapdragon 765 was extremely conservative with tiny power envelopes of around 2-2.6W. The Snapdragon 780G now is falling around 3.5-3.8W. This is still perfectly reasonable and well within the power envelope capacity of most devices without throttling. On the Mi 11 Lite 5G I saw some minor throttling, but I’m not sure the device is all that thermally optimised given its thinner form-factor.