NVIDIA Plots Mobile SoC GPU Performance, Surpassing Xbox 360 by 2014
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 19, 2012 7:50 PM ESTQualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years.
The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
darkcrayon - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
But it doesn't "deliver better graphics" in general, it just happens to in a couple of games specifically optimized for the Tegra 3. Of course it *can* deliver better graphics in a specific scenario. But it stands to reason that the same optimization effort done to the same game on the A5X will far surpass what could be done with the Tegra 3. That doesn't mean the Tegra 3 "is crap"- it just means nVidia's SoC isn't delivering anywhere near the state of the art in ARM SoC graphics performance. A lot of people expect that it would due to the nVidia name in PC graphics.BabelHuber - Saturday, April 21, 2012 - link
Shadowgun looks much better on Tegra3 than on the new iPad: Realtime light and shadow, water etc.This has been confirmed in various tests, including Anandtech's.
As long as the games look better on Tegra3, you have the better experience, period.
If Apple catches up, fine. As long as Apple doesn't, the advantages are purely theoretical and hence don't even matter.
tipoo - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
Well, they have three more CPU cores than Apple on a die size that is still smaller. Clearly its optimized for cost and CPU scaling over brute GPU performance. I forget the codename of their next one but I think its going to use an architecture more similar to todays Nvidia GPUs, so expect them to take the lead there.vision33r - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
Tegra 3 operates as one CPU all the time until tasks requires the use of the other 4 and then the one power saving CPU becomes dormant.Imo, the quadcore GPU solution makes more sense than 4 CPU cores makes very little sense today with so few apps take advantage of it.
Games can easily take advantage of the quadcore graphics especially when Apple optimizes their drivers to utilize them right away.
Nvidia pushed Tegra 3 out to sell 4 cores and fool the typical big numbers geeks.
tipoo - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
"Tegra 3 operates as one CPU all the time until tasks requires the use of the other 4 and then the one power saving CPU becomes dormant."Which still means there are five CPU cores on the die, which is still smaller than the A5 or A5X. I'm not saying Tegra 3 is great, just giving the OP a reason why Nvidia can't seem to match their own heritage in graphics, they devoted far less die space to the GPU.
frostyfiredude - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
I enjoy nVidia's use of a Logarithmic graph to stretch out their point.At a glance the graph makes it look like mobile in 2014 will be equal to current gen consoles in graphics performance and 3/4 that of the PC's trend line. Slap the same data on a linear graph and mobile will clearly be a couple times slower still than current consoles and over 100x slower than their trended PC.
This reminds me of their GTX680 vs HD7970 performance comparison graph. At a glance it looked like the GTX680 killed the HD7970 by HUGE margins in all the games, but in reality is was averaging 10% faster in all the games but BF3.
GnillGnoll - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
The graph shows mobile in 2014 projected to exceed the current consoles (the solid line, not the trend line). That doesn't change when you use a linear scale. Also, the difference between the solid mobile line and the PC trend line is less than 10x (as the distance is smaller than the distance between grid lines).gorash - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
Was the PC really 100 times more powerful than 360 by 2009?gorash - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
Well, I guess it's more like ~60 times.IntelUser2000 - Friday, April 20, 2012 - link
I see max ~200 for the PC line graph, stretching to 2010. I think 2009 is more like 150.Xbox 360 is at 40. That makes PC in 2009 4x faster in graphics compared to Xbox 360.