Qualcomm has traditionally been weak in the GPU department with their Snapdragon chips, but that is all set to change with the upcoming Adreno 320 GPU found in the new Snapdragon S4 Pro. Early benchmarks from Anandtech and other sites show that this new GPU is faster than anything we have ever seen in an Android device.
This week Qualcomm uploaded a new video of their Snapdragon S4 Pro running against a competitor’s quad-core platform (Tegra 3) in the graphics test GLBenchmark 2.5. We can see that the Adreno 320 GPU runs the benchmark pretty smooth while the GeForce GPU in the Tegra 3 stutters. To be fair to NVIDIA, their Tegra 3 chip first appeared last year and the Snapdragon S4 Pro is not even available in any shipping devices.
The Adreno 320 GPU should offer the fastest graphics performance.
That should change in the coming months as several OEMs have already announced smartphones with the Snapdragon S4 Pro, including the highly anticipated LG Optimus G. It’s great to see Qualcomm focus on graphics performance, and we hope they increase their efforts with Android games optimized for Snapdragon devices. Qualcomm released their Snapdragon GameCommand showcase app earlier this year, but they have not updated it in a long time.
If I worked for Qualcomm, I would send Gameloft a huge fat check to make sure that Modern Combat 4 was available as a flagship title for Snapdragon S4 Pro devices at launch.
How important is graphics performance when you consider purchasing your next Android device? Do you crave something faster, or do you find today’s mobile GPUs to be good enough.
