When reading the specifications of smartphones and tablets, most users first of all pay attention to the characteristics of the central processor and, the amount of RAM, screen size, built-in storage and camera. At the same time, they sometimes forget about such an important component of the device as the graphics processor (GPU). A typical GPU from one company or another is associated with a specific CPU. For example, the famous Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are always integrated with Adreno graphics chips. Taiwanese company MediaTek has typically shipped its chipsets with PowerVR GPUs from Imagination Technologies, and more recently with ARM Mali.

Chinese Allwiner processors usually come with Mali GPUs. Broadcom CPUs work in conjunction with VideoCore Graphic GPUs. Intel uses PowerVR GPUs and NVIDIA graphics with its mobile processors. Resource s-smartphone.com a rating was compiled of the three dozen best graphics processors in terms of their parameters, intended for use in smartphones and tablets. It is important for every modern user to know about .

1. Qualcomm Adreno 430 used in smartphone and;

3. PowerVR GX6450;

4. Qualcomm Adreno 420;

7. Qualcomm Adreno 330;

8. PowerVR G6200;

9. ARM Mali-T628;

10. PowerVR GSX 544 MP4;

11. ARM Mali-T604;

12. NVIDIA GeForce Tegra 4;

13. PowerVR SGX543 MP4;

14. Qualcomm Adreno 320;

15. PowerVR SGX543 MP2;

16. PowerVR SGX545;

17. PowerVR SGX544;

18. Qualcomm Adreno 305;

19. Qualcomm Adreno 225;

20. ARM Mali-400 MP4;

21. NVIDIA GeForce ULP (Tegra 3);

22. Broadcom VideoCore IV;

23. Qualcomm Adreno 220;

24. ARM Mali-400 MP2;

25. NVIDIA GeForce ULP (Tegra 2);

26. PowerVR GSX540;

27. Qualcomm Adreno 205;

28. Qualcomm Adreno 203;

29. PowerVR 531;

30. Qualcomm Adreno 200.

The GPU is the most important component of a smartphone. The performance of graphics and, first of all, the most graphically intensive applications - games - depends on its technical capabilities. Since the ranking was compiled in the first half of the year, some changes may have occurred since then. Do you think the position of processors in this rating corresponds to their real performance?

Most smartphones use ARM processor architecture. It was created by the company of the same name, and it also supports it. In the process of creating the bulk of chipsets that are used in mobile devices, its developments are used.

However, the approach may vary. Some companies license ready-made solutions, while others create their own, using the company's developments as a basis. For this reason, there is a confrontation in the market between basic and custom architectures of graphics and central processors.

Which is better Qualcomm or ARM?

To the basic solutions that have been created ARM, include processor cores and Mali graphics. They are used, for example, by chipmakers such as: Spreadtrum, Nvidia, Samsung, MediaTek.

Whereas Qualcomm has a different approach. For top-end chipsets, it practices the use of custom cores Kryo, and Snapdragon chips are equipped with Adreno graphics. It was developed by company specialists. The presence of different architectures raises the question of whether Who should be preferred - Qualcomm or ARM?

It is very difficult to give a definite answer to this question. As well as deciding whose graphics chips should be given the palm. It must be said that not only the situation matters here, but also the specific tasks assigned. And depending on this, the scales may tip in one direction or the other. This article is intended to help those who want to fully understand this issue.

Pros and cons of Adreno

Let's start with the pros:

High performance rate. Theoretical calculations indicate higher maximum graphics performance Adreno relatively Mali. They are valid if they are used in chipsets of the same class. So, for the Snapdragon 625, the computing power of Adreno 506 is about 130 GFLOPS (we are talking about billions of calculations in one second with floating point). Its competitor MTK Helio P10, which has a Mali T860 Mp2 GPU, has an indicator of 47 GFLOPS.

More advanced APIs supported. The latest generation of Adreno chips have a larger set of APIs (software development tools), and their versions are newer. For example, a year has passed since Adreno released its 500th version. And it supports Open GL ES 3.2, DirectX12, OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan. While Mali is not supported by DirectX12, and OpenCL is only available for the G 2016 series, which appeared relatively recently.

They overheat less. Adreno GPUs are not as prone to overheating as Mali. It must be said that Qualcomm had some processors that were prone to throttling. But these were processors that were distinguished by increased power, and accordingly, the central processor cores had a hot temper. They worked almost at the same level as their competitors when the reduced productivity regime was observed.

Now about the cons:

Quite a high cost. Qualcomm has to spend more money developing its graphics compared to what it costs competitors to license ARM Mali. For this reason, the cost of chipsets from an American manufacturer is higher than, say, MTK.

Software is less optimized. It's okay, but they use Mali graphics. Huawei also uses stock GPUs from ARM in Kirin models. And MediaTek prefer to use ARM graphics without using any other. The result of this is Mali's large share of the global market. That’s why game developers give preference to Mali when optimizing their products. We can say that having fewer GFLOPS, Mali in chips belonging to the mid-range and budget level is slightly worse in games than Adreno.

Fillrate is lower in rendering. Adreno chips have a relatively weak texturing domain, which is responsible for the process of forming the final image. Adreno 530 can render about six hundred million triangles that form a 3D picture in one second. And Mali G71 - 850,000,000.

Positive and negative sides of Mali

And in this case, let's start with the positive:

High prevalence rate. Due to the standard of Mali graphics for smartphone chipsets, games are optimized for it better than for Adreno.

Low price threshold. The cost of a license to produce chipsets with Mali is quite cheap. This allows even small companies that do not have the ability to make millions of investments to produce chips from Mali. And this provokes competition and helps stimulate the ARM company, pushing it to develop new solutions. In addition, Mali graphics users end up spending less money.

High clock speeds. The frequencies used in Mali GPUs are 1 GHz. And among competitors this figure does not exceed 650 MHz. The higher frequency on Mali chips allows for better performance of games that do not support multi-threaded 3D processing well.

Rendering Domain Power. The top-end Mali G71 GPU is capable of rendering about eight hundred and fifty triangles in one second, which is identical to twenty-seven billion pixels. And this despite the fact that Adreno 530 is only able to process 8 billion. This means that it is better to use it when working with graphics of HD textures with high resolution.

Fewer shader cores. Mali GPUs have fewer shader cores than competing products. Mali is also worse in terms of maximum performance in GFLOPS. In addition, they are less adaptable to games that are capable of efficiently parallelizing GPU workloads.

Configurations are limited. Actually, the lag between Mali GPUs and Adreno is insignificant. However, in real life, manufacturers prefer to use ready-made solutions that are not very complex and have a not very large number of computing clusters. Thus, the Mali T720 contains about eight blocks, but the most widely used is the Mali T720 MP2, which has only two clusters.

Susceptibility to overheating. Higher clock speeds make Mali's solutions more versatile, but as a side effect they have the potential to overheat. It is for this reason that it is not possible to integrate a significant number of graphics clusters into the chipset.

Many users have encountered a case where one game has not one apk file and cache, but four with different labels: Adreno, Mali, PowerVr, and Tegra. This is what this block looks like on our website:

The fact is that different manufacturers of smartphones or tablets use different processors. They have a built-in video processor, which we will learn to distinguish. Game developers mainly optimize the game in a common apk and cache file for all video accelerators. But for some reason, some games have specifications for different accelerators. Perhaps this is for better optimization, and perhaps to save device memory.

To determine your video accelerator, you can go in three ways: Look at the instructions for your device, study special services or official sites, and use third-party programs. Next we will look at all these methods in more detail.

1. If you purchased your device in a store, then most likely it will come with instructions for use. Look there and look for the technical specifications item. Look for an item describing the processor and video accelerator. These parameters can also be designated CPU and GPU.

2. In the second paragraph we will turn to Internet sources. To begin with, I recommend paying attention to the catalog from w3bsit3-dns.com on the page w3bsit3-dns.com/devdb. Select your device type, manufacturer, and model. At the bottom of the technical specifications, look for the corresponding item.

If suddenly your device is not there, you can turn to official sources. Go to the website of the smartphone or tablet manufacturer and look for it in the product catalog. It also contains the technical specifications and model of your video accelerator.
In the end, you can simply enter the manufacturer and model of the device into the Google or Yandex search engine. This way you will get information from unofficial sources.

3. Now let's turn to third-party applications, which you can download from the Play Market. There are a large number of them, but we will look at the most popular:

AnTuTu Benchmark

This application is the most popular for checking the performance of Android devices. But if you go to the “Info” tab, then there you will find the “Graphics Processor” column. This is your video accelerator!

This application shows the most detailed information about your device, starting with technical characteristics, as well as the presence of sensors, operating system, and battery. But after searching the GPU Renderer column a little, you will see the model of your graphics video accelerator.

And if you have a processor that is not on the list, then use the following replacements:
For Broadcom processors - try apk and cache from Adreno
For Vivante processors - apk and cache from Mali must be suitable
For Intel processors - mainly suitable apk and cache from Tegra

Well, that's all) I hope everything worked out for you! If this article helped you, please share it on social networks.

Modern smartphones and tablet PCs simply cannot be imagined without a graphics accelerator, which is part of a single-chip system (system-on-a-chip). Nowadays, a graphics core is required not only to run 3D games, but also to draw the operating system interface and play ultra-high-resolution (4K) video.

Intel Pioneer

In the early 2000s, mobile phones and PDAs handled game graphics exclusively using the CPU. At the same time, the pictures in the games were extremely primitive. The ice broke in 2006, when Intel introduced the 2700G mobile graphics core with performance at the level of the Sony PlayStation One game console. True, the Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems were unable to fully realize its potential.

Dell X50v – PDA with Intel 2700G graphics accelerator

Mobile graphics accelerators began to be used effectively only with the release of the Apple iPhone and Android smartphones. Thus, the first generation of iPhone was built on the Samsung ARM 1176JZ(F)-S processor with Mbx lite graphics (from Imagination Technologies). The first graphics core for Android was Adreno 130, which will be discussed below.

Qualcomm Adreno

In 2005, Qualcomm, which had previously been exclusively engaged in equipment for cellular networks, received a license from ARM Limited to manufacture and, most importantly, modify ARM architecture processors. It took her several years to develop her own architecture called Scorpion (ARMv7 instruction set) and implement the energy-efficient ATI Imageon graphics accelerator.

In 2008, the HTC Touch Diamond Windows Mobile communicator with a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor and Adreno 130 graphics (renamed ATI Imageon) went on sale. And soon the world saw the first Android smartphone - HTC Dream (operator name T-Mobile G1) with exactly the same single-chip system. Inspired by the success in the Android market, Qualcomm bought AMD's mobile graphics division.

Modern Qualcomm graphics are represented by both budget models (Adreno 203, 205 and 305) and real 3D monsters (Adreno 320, 330 and 420). Unlike its predecessor, the Adreno 130, which used an outdated pipeline architecture with fixed block functions, modern Qualcomm graphics are built on a unified shader architecture. The only exception was Adreno 205 with VLIW architecture.

NVIDIA GeForce ULP

NVIDIA, a long-time leader in the computer graphics industry, could not remain on the sidelines of the fast-growing mobile gadget market for long. And if the first generation of NVIDIA Tegra chips was not used anywhere except for the Microsoft Zune HD media player, then the second generation created a real sensation. Thus, LG Optimus 2X based on Tegra 2 became the world's first dual-core Android smartphone. And the lion's share of the 2011 Android tablet lineup was built on the second generation Tegra. The Tegra 2 mobile graphics core received 8 cores and the loud name GeForce ULP.

In the third generation of NVIDIA single-chip systems, the number of graphics cores increased to 12, and in the fourth - to 72 pieces. The real revelation was the announcement of the Tegra K1 chip with graphics for as many as 192 cores and, most importantly, the mature Kepler architecture. Finally, it is possible to compare NVIDIA smartphone and tablet graphics with its own video cards for PCs. If you do not make allowances for the low frequency of the graphics core and video memory of the Tegra K1, then we can assume that it is only half as slow as the laptop NVIDIA GeForce 740M (384 Kepler cores).

Imagination PowerVR

Despite the strong market position of Qualcomm and the authority of NVIDIA, it is PowerVR mobile graphics from Imagination Technologies that are the most widespread in the world. According to some reports, its share reaches 50 percent of the market. However, it is not strange, because PowerVR graphics are used in their single-chip systems by several large manufacturers.

Thus, MediaTek uses PowerVR SGX 531 and SGX 544MP graphics accelerators in its ARM processors. The PowerVR SGX 545 model makes quite good friends with x86 processor cores in Intel Atom chips. We must not forget about the Sony PlayStation Vita portable gaming console with PowerVR SGX 543MP4+ graphics.

Apple remains Imagination's priority customer. It is to her that Imagination gives the right to be the first to use its latest developments. This happened in 2011 with the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 with two core clusters (for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S), and the same thing happened last year with the PowerVR G6430 with four clusters (for iPad Air, iPad mini 2gen and iPhone 5S).

But Imagination has even more powerful graphics in its arsenal - PowerVR GX6650 with 192 cores, like the NVIDIA Tegra K1. So why is image quality in mobile games so slow to improve? We will also talk about this below.

ARM Mali

The British company ARM Limited, which invented the processor architecture of the same name in the 1980s, designs not only processor cores, but also graphics cores. And its partners decide for themselves whether to license only the first, or also the second. The breakthrough for ARM Limited was the Mali 55 graphics, which was used in the LG Renoir mobile phone not so much for games, but for smooth menu animation.

The first full-fledged 3D graphics accelerator from ARM Limited was the Mali-200, which was eventually replaced by the multi-cluster Mali-400MP. A new round of evolution was the Mali-T604 graphics (almost twice as fast as the Mali-400MP), the first device based on which was the Google Nexus 10 tablet.

The ARM Mali-T760, capable of constructing up to 1.4 billion triangles per second, will compete with the graphics flagships of 2014 - Adreno 420, Tegra K1 and PowerVR G6650. In addition, the Mali-T760 supports the latest OpenGL ES 3.0 and DirectX 11 graphics technologies, as well as OpenCL parallel computing.

Compare the incomparable

Comparing two mobile graphics accelerators to each other is a thankless task. You should least trust benchmark indicators, since they give a total assessment of the processor and integrated graphics. Some single-chip systems contain powerful processor cores and at the same time a weak graphics accelerator, while in others, on the contrary, the graphics outweigh.

The best way to compare two mobile graphics cores is to take a closer look at their architecture. As an example, let's take three well-known models: Qualcomm Adreno 220 (from the Snapdragon S3 chip), NVIDIA GeForce ULP (from Tegra 2) and Imagination PowerVR SGX 543MP2 (from Apple A5). Thus, the Adreno 220 graphics contains 8 unified shaders operating at a default frequency of 266 MHz, and its performance is estimated at 17 GLOPS.

The competing NVIDIA GeForce ULP version of Tegra 2 also has 8 shaders, but unlike Adreno they are not unified. Four shaders are pixel and four more are vertex. The standard GeForce ULP core frequency is 300 MHz. Peak performance of Tegra 2 is 5.6 GLOPS. A significant lag in performance compared to Adreno 220 with a generally similar number of shaders is caused by a smaller number of instructions processed per clock cycle.

We should also talk about the Imagination PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics, which is often mistakenly called “dual-core”. In fact, the prefix MP2 in the name implies the presence of two clusters of cores. Each cluster of the SGX 543MP2 contains 4 pixel shaders and 2 vertex shaders. That is, the total number of shaders on the SGX 543MP2 is 12 (8+4), the initial operating frequency is 200 MHz, and the performance is 14.4 GFLOPS.

The unified shader architecture is much more modern than the fixed one. For example, modern PC video cards contain a large number of unified shaders (more than a thousand) and significantly fewer fixed ones (less than a hundred). Performance in games depends primarily on what architecture the developer was focusing on, that is, on optimization.

And the frequency of RAM may differ from smartphone to smartphone, part of which, as you know, is borrowed by integrated graphics. It is RAM with low bandwidth that can become the bottleneck of the graphics subsystem, which will result in low benchmark scores.

Have the graphics in the games improved?

If you compare mobile games from five years ago and modern ones, the difference in picture quality will, as they say, be obvious. But if we take into account the multiple increase in performance of ARM processors and graphics accelerators integrated into them, the picture clearly has not improved enough.

Several years ago, NVIDIA allegedly tried to give impetus to the development of graphics in mobile games. Thus, the zombie shooter Dead Trigger on smartphones and tablets with the Tegra 3 chip worked with advanced graphics options: rays of light, shadows, metallic shine and haze. However, it soon became clear that for all this powerful GeForce ULP graphics are not required at all, it is enough to edit the game configuration file using root rights.

Unity development environment

However, ARM chip manufacturers and, especially, Google and Apple should not be blamed for all the troubles. Progress in picture quality is primarily hampered by game developers. Selling their creations for a dollar or two, they are not ready to invest hundreds of thousands in developing their own graphics engine. A ray of hope appeared only with the advent of the cross-platform Unity engine. I would like to believe that this year there will be games with truly beautiful and realistic pictures.

A modern smartphone is built like a regular computer, only very small in size. It has a central processor, RAM, long-term non-volatile storage and, of course, a video accelerator. This is a chip that allows 3D games to have colorful and realistic graphics. In other words, this is a “video card” that is found in every smartphone. For those who are planning to buy a mobile gadget for gaming, it will be useful to know what video accelerators are installed in phones and what their performance is. The review of mobile graphics chips below will tell you about this.

The vast majority of mobile phones sold have video accelerators of one of three types. These are Mali, Adreno, PowerVR SGX and GeForce Ultra-Low Power (ULP).

The Mali graphics architecture is being developed by the British company ARM. These chips are components of various systems on a chip (SoC). This is the name for microcircuits, which are actually a whole computer and contain all the main elements. Mali is used in their products by Samsung, Gigabyte, Rockchip and others. For example, Mali-400 MP is part of the Samsung Exynos 421x SoC. It is used, for example, in the Samsung Galaxy SII and SIII.

PowerVR is the brainchild of Imagination Technologies, which previously developed video accelerators for desktop PCs. PowerVR chips are used in products from Samsung, Apple, Motorola and others. Thus, different generations of video accelerators from PowerVR are installed in all Apple iPhones.

Currently, Qualcomm owns the Adreno mobile graphics division. It bought this technology from AMD, which, in turn, acquired Adreno along with ATI's assets. The latter has been the owner of Adreno since 2006, when it bought the Finnish graphics developer BitBoys.

GeForce ULP is a mobile version of the NVIDIA video accelerator, which is part of the system on the Tegra chip of all generations. Tegra's main advantage over its competitors is specialized content that is intended only for devices based on this SoC. This is thanks to NVIDIA working closely with game developers to optimize games for GeForce graphics. All applications redesigned for Tegra are located in the special application store Tegra Zone.

To find out which video accelerator is in your smartphone, you need to know the exact marking of the model or its system on the chip. Owners of Android gadgets can do this using programs such as Quadrant, AnTuTu Benchmark, 3DRating Benchmark. Then look at the table below.

The Techivian resource tested the most popular video chip models and received the following performance rating:

In other words, if you need a smartphone that can work with “heavy” 3D games even a year after release, then you need to buy a gadget with a top-end video accelerator. These are Mali 400, Adreno 225 and Adreno 320. For casual and two-dimensional games, a smartphone with a mid-class video accelerator will be enough. These are Adreno 200 and 205, PowerVR SGX543, and Mali 300. They provide Sony PSP-level graphics.

But very soon, mobile chips will move from graphics level of portable consoles to the quality of desktop consoles. For example, the Mali-T658 chip, which will appear this year, promises a performance increase of up to 10 times compared to the Mali-400.