Adreno 530 GPU to be Good News for Gaming on Android

As MWC 2016 nears, news of new smartphones using Qualcomm’s latest  820 SoC is going to start coming in thick and fast. The snapdragon 820 SoC is slated to come with Adreno 530 GPU which is said to give almost 40-50% more performance than last year’s Adreno GPU, and as claimed by Qualcomm is going to be more energy efficient too.

Well, for starters Snapdragon 820 is a chip built from scratch. The CPU cores, the GPU, the DSP, the modem, the image processors. everything has been upgraded after the debacle that the Samsung 810 was. On this new architecture, Qualcomm claims to have upgraded things across the board.

The Adreno 530 will be offering up to 2.5 times an increase in video performance. It will also be coming with full support of OpenCL 2.0, Renderscript, Vulkan, OpenGL ES 3.1 + AEP. Shared Virtual Memory, which comes with OpenCL will now allow data sharing between an Open CL’s host and the device’s GPU.

Last year’s GPU was a nightmare for Android gamers who faced grave heating issues owing to the GPU of the chipset while all the time having to deal with dismal graphics performance. Qualcomm has revealed that a lot of work has gone into the GPU on the 820 SoC to ensure that the 530 can achieve 40-50% performance boost at acceptable energy levels.

Seeing is believing, and as such, early GFXBench tests have also revealed that the Adreno 530 might just really be the beast Qualcomm claims it to be. The 6-Core GPU, PowerVR GT7600 found on the iPhone 6s Plus comes close to the might of the Adreno 530 but loses out to it in the end.

Surprisingly, the only GPU that did beat the 530, and that too by a small margin, was the Nvidia Tegra X1 chipset. Worth a mention is the fact that the Tegra X1 because of its form factor is found on large tablets. Such is the might of the Adreno 530 that other GPUs like the Mali-T760MP8 and the Mali-T880 MP4 couldn’t even come anywhere close to it in the benchmark tests.

This will come as great news especially for those of us who are looking to buy the Galaxy S7 once it arrives. Samsung’s flagship offering from last year, the S6, and S6 Edge, though being heavy on specs did lose out to the iPhone lineup when it came to raw graphics processing power.

The Mali T760MP8 on the Exynos and the Adreno 430 on other Android handsets sporting the Snapdragon 810 were significantly under-powered for graphics tasks. The resurgence of Snapdragon with the 820 could close the huge divide that had been created over the last year.

For gamers and power users who prefer the Android platform this could indeed turn out to be a good year.