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The Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno iGPU
- dagmx 2y agoIt’s been interesting seeing the difference in architecture play out in benchmarks. For context, there was a lot of hullabaloo a while ago when the Adreno 730 was posting super impressive benchmarks, outpacing Apple’s GPU and putting up a good fight against AMD and NVIDIA’s lower/mid range cards. Since then, with the Snapdragon X, there’s been a bit of a deflation which has shown the lead flip dramatically when targeting more modern graphics loads. The Adreno now ranks behind the others when it comes to benchmarks that reflect desktop gaming, including being behind Apple’s GPU. It’ll be interesting to see how Qualcomm moves forward with newer GPU architectures. Whether they’ll sacrifice their mobile lead in the pursuit of gaining ground for higher end gaming.
- swatcoder 2y ago> Whether they’ll sacrifice their mobile lead in the pursuit of gaining ground for higher end gaming. It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes. Because of Apple's strict vertical integration, there's so much market for them as the de facto manufacturer delivering parts to pretty much every competitor making products that want a high performance/power ratio.
- dagmx 2y agoWell it depends which space they want to be taken seriously in. Currently the 741 is very poor when compared to any dGPU or Apple. It only favourably compares to iGPUs. I believe they have three options 1. Say it’s meant to be like an iGPU, and work on supporting dGPUs to complement it. 2. Say that they want to compete with dGPUs/Apple and risk losing their mobile crown. Which is what Apple did in exchange for one design across all products. 3. Say they want to have a split product portfolio. A more desktop focused GPU for Snapdragon X with a more mobile centric one for 8xx
- silisili 2y agoI think it's going to be 3, but a split between mobile and laptop/desktop without any concern for competing with dGPUs. It makes no sense at all for them to. If they can give good enough, on par or better with current iGPUs, with a lower power usage and potentially even fanless, they're going to sell a billion of them. They'll be in every Chromebook in the world.
- hypercube33 2y agoThey aren't gunning for Chromebook deployments...these are currently in business laptop models and AMD may have already beaten them in all fronts on some of these per dollar other than ultralight and video playback duration. Lenovo has a A model that can do 16 hours and light gaming. more importantly it runs x86 apps full speed. I agree these likely will take over the sub $1000 market if given the chance but they are shooting at $1500-2000
- silisili 2y agoInteresting. Seems like a huge missed opportunity there, as those outsell everything else by quite a margin. Perhaps they'll expand into both ends like they do phones, eg the 4xx on the low end and 8xx on the high end.
- RussianCow 2y agoPresumably the margins on Chromebook are terrible compared to those of mid to high end laptops. I don't blame them for wanting to start with the higher margin market and eventually work down.
- dagmx 2y agoThey aren’t fighting for Chromebook territory with this though. All their comparisons are to the MacBook Air and mid-high end windows laptops because that’s the market they’re gunning for. These are meant to be $1k-2k devices.
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- benreesman 2y agoI grew up in San Diego and at the time being involved with technology meant living in Qualcomm’s shadow in one way or another. So I tend to agree that being the reference mobile SoC vendor outside of Cupertino is pretty on brand for their absolute top priority. At Qualcomm if it doesn’t make dollars it doesn’t make sense as we used to say. And good for them! After a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a pure play CDMA patent troll they seem to have gotten back to their roots and started doing engineering again. It’s a cool company.
- a-dub 2y ago> It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes. haven't google and samsung started making their own socs?
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoI think there is a market for a dual-world architecture, with loads of dark silicon in a low battery setting (and suffering performance being acceptable) and a high power mode, that is able to compete with regular desktop gpu architectures.
- djmips 2y agoThe Mobile lead and gaining ground for higher end gaming are aligned in many areas so you have to do both.
- dagmx 2y agoIn some areas sure, but it’s really down to what you’re dedicating silicon to in terms of capabilities.
- jayd16 2y agoHow so? I'm fairly confused about what you're implying. Is Apple sacrificing mobile capabilities for better desktop capability, for example?
- dagmx 2y agoYes. Assuming that a GPU size and node is similar between different GPUs, then different features which require silicon do it at the expense of other features. It’s always a balancing act. That’s effectively the big rub between NVIDIA and AMD today with raytracing + tensor support vs pure raster+compute throughput. Apple just went through a major GPU architecture change [1]. They focused a ton on maximizing for AAA game usage and followed the NVIDIA route to bias towards where they think things are going. At least according to the simplified architecture diagrams for both Apple graphics and Adreno, Apple has more raytracing silicon than Adreno. It also supports stuff that doesn’t require silicon but does have effects on GPU design like mesh shading or their new dynamic caching that improves occupancy for high draw count games with large uber shaders. Compared to Adreno that focused more on raw triangle throughput instead, but doesn’t scale as well with complexity. It performs much better on mobile benchmarks that fit that usage pattern, but falls behind with desktop benchmarks that follow Apple’s priorities. [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375
- jayd16 2y agoI think the tail is wagging the dog here. Those mobile workloads are tuned towards what currently works. If Apple or Qualcomm pull off desktop features in a mobile power envelope then the industry would happily adjust.
- LegitShady 2y agoTo me it seems as if the selling points of these latest snapdragon chips is high efficiency/battery life and competitive performance, so given the efficiency angle it makes less sense to try to make gaming machines out of them right now. Maybe in the future there will be a gaming oriented snapdragon less concerned about battery life.
- chaorace 2y agoI'm not surprised the Adreno numbers didn't hold up as well as the rest of the Snapdragon benchmarks. Back in 2013 the Dolphin team blogged about their terrible experiences with the Adreno drivers and vendor support[1]. Ten years later in 2023, the same team blogged about how those same continuing issues led them to completely replace the official Adreno driver with a userland alternative[2]. As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips). [1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/#horrible-qualcommadreno https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and... [2]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/08/13/dolphin-progress-report-may-june-and-july-2023/#50-19611-implement-custom-driver-support-by-k0bin https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/08/13/dolphin-progress-rep... Kudos to the Dolphin website developers for keeping 10+ years of blogs & hyperlinks fully functional and properly tagged. They always produce great reading material!
- eropple 2y ago> As it stands today, the only credible names in ARM SOC GPUs seem to be Apple (M chips) & Nvidia (Tegra chips). I've been out of this space for years, so my knowledge is definitely stale, but have Mali GPUs fallen out?
- dagmx 2y agoMali has decent coverage. The pixel phones use them and so do a lot of mediatek based low-mid range devices.
- subharmonicon 2y agoCan you point to any Tegra data showing that it’s actually competitive with Apple? I just searched and don’t see that.
- chaorace 2y agoI don't have any data. I'm speaking strictly with the knowledge that Tegra X1 powers the Nintendo Switch and that the Nintendo Switch has a broad base of engine support. Normally, if it were a bad platform to work on, I expect that we'd have heard about it by now from third party developers (e.g.: CELL architecture)
- segasaturn 2y agoIs there any reason why these ARM iGPUs are so much worse than iGPUs from Intel and AMD? My 11th gen Intel CPU's Xe graphics completely outpaces my M1 Mac's and something like a Ryzen 5 5600G destroys both.
- dagmx 2y agoI’m curious what benchmark you’re looking at. The M1 is a very competitive iGPU that is competitive with an Nvidia 1650. Are you looking at pure gaming performance and are you sure it’s not going through a translation layer? To quote Anandtech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...) > Overall, the M1’s GPU starts off very strong here. At both Normal and High settings it’s well ahead of any other integrated GPU, and even a discrete Radeon RX 560X. Only once we get to NVIDIA’s GTX 1650 and better does the M1 finally run out of gas.
- segasaturn 2y agoNo benchmarks, just based on personal usage. I think I found the issue after posting that comment though, which is macOS's unhelpful deprecation of openGL support. The games that I play on macOS used OpenGL and will probably never implement Metal which is a shame. They were Apple Silicon native though, no translation. Games in question are Factorio and RuneScape.
- dagmx 2y agoAh yeah it’s possible individual games do perform poorly. But in a general sense the integrated GPU in the M series processors is closer in competition to a low/mid discrete GPU than the integrated GPUs in other brands.
- smusamashah 2y agoThat's a mouthful of a name
- dagmx 2y agoNot really any more than any other brand. The Intel Meteor Lake Arc iGPU The AMD Ryzen Radeon iGPU Apple are pretty much the only major SoC company who don’t brand the CPU and GPU independently
- gary_0 2y agoRe: the manual driver updates. Recently I put a clean Win11 install on an ASUS Meteor Lake laptop for someone, and Windows downloaded and installed all the latest drivers automatically (along with a bunch of fresh bloatware, natch). Maybe Qualcomm is working with Microsoft so their drivers will get updated the same way?
- LegitShady 2y agoI assume they are given the launch of snapdragon copilot laptops, and your witnessing it get drivers from windows update.
- daviddever23box 2y agoYes - and it is certainly possible to export the "final", up-to-date set of drivers via DISM, then build an orthogonal set that you can recursively install via a single one-click pnputil batch file in Audit Mode (Ctrl-Shift-F3 at the top of OOBE). This is the easiest way to validate benchmarks across neutral, bloatware-free OS versions (at least the ones supported by that SoC, anyway).
- benreesman 2y ago“In Adreno tradition, Adreno X1’s first level cache is a dedicated texture cache. Compute accesses bypass the L1 and go to the next level in the cache hierarchy. It’s quite different from current AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPU architectures, which have a general purpose first level cache with significant capacity. On prior Adreno generations, the GPU-wide L2 cache would have to absorb all compute accesses. Adreno X1 takes some pressure off the L2 by adding 128 KB cluster caches.” People have been tinkering with L1 cache conditionality since the L1i and L1d split in 1976 but the Qualcomm people are going hard on this and the jury seems out how it’s going to play. The line between the L1 and the register file has been getting blurrier every year for over a decade and I increasingly have a heuristic around paying the most attention to L2 behavior until the profiles are in but I’m admittedly engaging in alchemy. Can any serious chip people as opposed to an enthusiastic novice like myself weigh in on how the thinking is shaping up WRT this?
- rys 2y agoIn practice, what gets labelled as the L1 cache in a GPU marketing diagram or 3rd party analysis might well not be that first level of a strict cache hierarchy. That means it’s hard to do any kind of cross-vendor or cross-architecture comparison about what they are or how they work. They’re highly implementation dependent. In the GPUs I work on, there’s not really a blurred line between the actual L1 and the register file. There’s not even just one register file. Sometimes you also get an L3! These kinds of implementation specific details are where GPUs find a lot of their PPA today, but they’re (arguably sadly) usually quite opaque to the programmer or enthusiastic architecture analyst.
- perdomon 2y agoHow soon can I buy a handheld console with one of these inside, and can it run God of War?
- mirsadm 2y agoWith my own use case I've noticed very poor compute shader performance on the Snapdragon GPUs. Even worse the drivers are completely unpredictable. The same shader will sometimes run 2x slower for seemingly no good reason at all. I didn't realise games these days relied so much on compute shaders. It's no suprise it doesn't perform as well as it should.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoARM remains a shitty backwater of unsupportable crap ass nonsense being thrown over the wall. Qualcomm bought Imageon from AMD in 2009. Sure, they've done some work, made some things somewhat better. But hearing that the graphics architecture is woefully out of date, with terrible compute performance is ghastly unsurprisingly. Trying to see thing thing run games is going to be a sad sad sad story. And that's only 50% the translation layers (which would be amazing if this were Linux and not a Windows or Android device).
- rubymamis 2y agoWhy is there no comparison with Apple's iGPU?
- nomercy400 2y agoBecause you cannot compare between an Apple's iGPU and this chip, while using the same software stack. Because you cannot buy a laptop with this chip and use MacOS. If they would compare it iwth an Apple iGPU, they'd be comparing two things: the hardware AND the OS, which makes it less clear what is contributing to your benckmark results.
- nuccy 2y agoGenerally this is a correct argument - to compare hardware one needs to use the same OS/software stack. But the argument works the other way around also, if there is no identical software stack possible does it really matter how raw hardware compares? The end user running a game or an application would experience hardware+OS rather than just hardware.
- zozbot234 2y ago> Because you cannot compare between an Apple's iGPU and this chip, while using the same software stack. Apple Silicon hardware can run Linux (with unofficial GPU support as of late, although still lacking support for the NPU), and official support for Linux on Snapdragon laptop platforms is supposedly in the works. So we should be able to do a proper comparison as soon as official support is added for both platforms as part of a single mainline kernel release.
- mbs159 2y agoThey would have to run the same software, e.g. install Linux on both machines.
- criddell 2y agoIf I had to bet, I would say it's because they don't beat Apple. If they had a benchmark result that showed a big win over Apple's design, it would be at the top row of the chart.
- jeroenhd 2y agoI wonder if there's performance being left on the table because of the way programs and games are designed. It's no secret Qualcomm's mobile chips will run like shit when you try to use desktop code on them, because they're designed differently. I wonder if we're seeing aspects of that here. It would explain why Qualcomm convinced their press team of impressive numbers that nobody in the real world has been able to replicate. There was a whole comic about design differences when porting desktop style games qnd shaders to mobile (I can't find it for the life of me) which was a pretty good beginner's guide to porting that stuck with me.
- mandarax8 2y ago> There was a whole comic about design differences when porting desktop style games qnd shaders to mobile This one from arm? https://interactive.arm.com/story/the-arm-manga-guide-to-the-mali-gpu/page/1 https://interactive.arm.com/story/the-arm-manga-guide-to-the...
- jeroenhd 2y agoThat's the one! Guess it came directly from ARM, no wonder I couldn't find it.
- pjmlp 2y ago> DirectX 12 Ultimate: Disabled That right there is already a reason not to buy this in 2024. DirectX 12 Ultimate is 4 years old by now, and with DirectX 12 the best it can do is a 10 years old 3D API. This is basically a GPU for Office work.
- cubefox 2y agoMost games still don't use DX12 Ultimate features. Some use some ray tracing, but as the article says, this is expensive and should be left off for laptop devices anyway. As for mesh shaders, there is currently one (1) game I know of that uses them. Alan Wake part 2. I think the other features like sampler feedback are also not really used in practice.
- pjmlp 2y agoYeah, but I don't buy hardware for what I can do today with technology from years ago, rather for something that lasts 5 to 10 years.
- Synaesthesia 2y agoDepends on what you want to do. This GPU is impressive for a thin and light laptop with long battery life. It obviously doesn't compare well to large power hungry dedicated GPUs.
- bhouston 2y agoNice! What are the comparisons with Apple’s you in the latest M-series chips?