With its heavy reliance on compute shaders, it’s not surprising to see the Adreno 530 GPUs out front once again in this test.
Perhaps the biggest change is the inclusion of hardware tessellation. Like the earlier Manhattan test, it uses deferred rendering and dynamic lighting, but it also adds visual effects such as HDR tone mapping, motion blur, and bloom using geometry and compute shaders.
GFXBench 4.0 Car Chase is Kishonti’s latest high-level game engine that uses OpenGL ES 3.1 with Android Extension Pack. With more ALUs and twice as many texture units, the Exynos 7420 offers better GPU performance than the Kirin 950 and 955 in Huawei’s flagships. The Exynos 7420 SoC in Samsung’s Galaxy S6 uses the previous generation Mali-T760 GPU in an eight core configuration with a slightly lower max clock. While both use ARM’s latest Mali-T880 GPU, they employ fewer cores (four) that ramp to a high max frequency. In the previous section, we routinely saw Huawei’s Mate 8 and P9 near the top of our performance charts however, their GPU performance is not at the same level. The G5 also maintains its nearly 3x advantage over the G4, a significant jump for just one generation.
The G5 outperforms the previous generation Adreno 430 in the Nexus 6P by 68% and is almost three times faster than the Adreno 418 in the G4.Įven when rendering onscreen at 1440p, the Adreno 530 in the G5 and Galaxy S7 outpace the OnePlus 2’s Adreno 430 rendering at a lower 1080p resolution. In the offscreen results, Qualcomm’s Adreno 530 leads the pack. GFXBench 3.0 uses an OpenGL ES 3.0 game engine that stresses lighting and pixel effects. Our initial look at the Adreno 530 showed that it’s a more balanced architecture, with big improvements to vertex processing that alleviate the biggest handicap for past Adreno GPUs. This emphasis has given Adreno GPUs an advantage in games that make heavy use of pixel shading and post-processing, but ARM’s Mali and Imagination’s PowerVR GPUs still held an edge in vertex processing in some configurations. From the few shreds of information the company has shared over the years, along with our detailed measurements, we know that improving ALU performance has been a top priority for the past few generations. We officially know next to nothing about its low-level architecture Qualcomm remains tight-lipped about its GPUs, turning them into intriguing black boxes.
The LG G5 uses Qualcomm’s latest Adreno 530 GPU.