Although there are still a few days to go until 2022, with the successive warm-up and even listing of a number of next-generation flagship 5G SoCs in December 2021, the entire mobile phone market has actually entered the rhythm of competition in the new year ahead of schedule.
In the new top flagship SoC, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 (hereinafter referred to as the new Snapdragon 8) is undoubtedly one of the most topical products. On the one hand, because its release and actually the market are the earliest, and so far is still the only 2022 top flagship mobile platform that can actually be bought; on the other hand, many friends who pay attention to mobile phone technology may be impressed by the data circulating on the network before, such as the new Snapdragon 8 "greatly improved camera performance" and "AI performance soared 400%".
So has the new Snapdragon 8 improved so much in image and AI design? Indeed there is. Its 18-bit ISP can indeed handle 4096 times the color data of the previous generation, and the AI accelerator has achieved 400% of the performance and energy efficiency ratio of the previous generation with the joint blessing of software and hardware improvements.
But compared to the "scary" improvements in these data, the changes that the new Snapdragon 8 also deserves everyone's attention may be more about the new architecture GPU it integrates and a series of large technical improvements in game quality, frame rate, audio, and the potential long-term impact they may have on the entire mobile phone market and even the mobile game industry.
The new architecture Adreno GPU, the measured score improvement far exceeds the official
As we all know, with the overall naming system of Qualcomm's generation of mobile platforms greatly adjusted, the Adreno GPU integrated in the new Snapdragon 8 is no longer named after numbers.
To be honest, this may not be a good idea, because the new naming method just to some extent, masks the fact that the Adreno GPU in the new Snapdragon 8 has replaced a new generation of architecture (that is, the previously rumored Adreno 700 series). In addition, in the official information, the performance improvement of the new Adreno is only given the reference data of "30% improvement in rendering performance and 60% speed increase under Vulkan drive", which causes the outside world to actually seriously underestimate the GPU progress of the new Snapdragon 8.
Why do we say that? Because just after Qualcomm released the new Snapdragon 8, we Sanyi Life used a reference design equipped with 8+512GB storage combination to conduct a running score test.
Judging from our test results, the GPU performance of the new Snapdragon 8 in the GPU sub-project of the Antutu evaluation can easily reach more than 60% compared with the Snapdragon 888 mass production model with no additional heat dissipation and higher storage configuration.
What is more interesting is that if you compare the test items, you will find that in the low-load OpenGL ES or Vulkan scenario, the GPU of the new Snapdragon 8 has a performance improvement of about 50%-60% compared with the Larger Memory Snapdragon 888 model. If it is in the high-load Vulkan scene, the new Snapdragon 8 reference design with only 8GB of memory can get twice the achievement of the 16GB memory Snapdragon 888 mass production model.
Why is the measured performance far superior? Energy efficiency and optimization may be the focus
Although the official claim that the new Snapdragon 8's Adreno GPU rendering capability is 30% higher than that of the previous generation, we can get the results of doubling the performance of the previous generation under the measured heavy load with the running score software. Why does the performance of the actual test exceed the official theoretical improvement level? In principle, there are two factors that may have contributed to this situation.
First, there's the energy efficiency gains of the new Adreno GPUs. According to the official information, the GPU energy efficiency of the new Snapdragon 8 has increased by 20% compared with the previous generation (Snapdragon 888, Adreno660). This means that in the 3D scenario of heavy load, the GPU of the new Snapdragon 8 may have lower power consumption and heat generation than the previous generation. In this way, it is not so easy to reduce the frequency phenomenon, and naturally higher measured performance can be obtained.
But more importantly, when announcing a "30% rendering performance improvement" for the new generation of Adreno GPUs, Qualcomm is probably referring to the most conservative hardware-only growth rate, without calculating the various software optimizations and game performance improvement technologies that Adreno GPUs are now equipped with.
For example, the new generation of Adreno GPUs can now support VRS Pro (Variable Resolution Rendering Advanced), a technology that can effectively reduce the rendering workload of game screens, greatly save GPU performance, and improve game frame rates, and even VRS has only recently appeared on PC GPUs. Therefore, the new Snapdragon 8 provides support for VRS Pro, which can also be regarded as a move towards the PC and game console in the graphics technology of the mobile GPU solution on the mobile phone.
For example, in response to the needs of high-frame games (such as racing, gunfight themes), the new generation of Adreno GPUs also introduced a function called "Adreno Graphics Motion Engine". It can achieve an approximate "exact interpolation" effect within the game, directly doubling the number of game frames without adding additional processing power.
In addition, considering that more and more high-quality games are already appearing on mobile phones, Qualcomm has also introduced support for stereoscopic rendering for the GPU of the new Snapdragon 8. Stereoscopic rendering is often used in PC and console games for high-precision smoke, light and shadow effects. Therefore, the introduction of stereoscopic rendering functions has paved the way for the future realization of "end-game-level high-quality" for devices based on the new Snapdragon 8.
Not only that, but a deeper look at the Snapdragon Game Toolkit kit provided to developers by the new Snapdragon 8 will find many optimization technologies that can greatly improve the performance of the game. For example, the occlusion culling plug-in can increase the rendering processing efficiency of 3D scenes to 16 times the original, and the AI super score function can use the AI accelerator of the new Snapdragon 8 to achieve super-resolution output of game screens, achieving a performance improvement effect similar to "DLSS" on a PC. Even the DSP unit of the new Snapdragon 8 is optimized for the audio processing in the game, which can process up to 128 audio objects at the same time, thus creating an "immersive surround sound" effect similar to that on next-generation game consoles.
Talk less and do more, Snapdragon is redefining mobile gaming
It is not difficult to find that if Qualcomm "counts" the various game screen enhancements, frame rate optimizations, and rendering acceleration technologies they have installed on the new Snapdragon 8 into the improvement of the new generation of Adreno GPUs, then its real game performance growth will obviously far exceed the so-called 30% "rendering capacity increase".
However, the question arises, why does Qualcomm not directly use the (necessarily higher) performance in real games to improve this data for publicity, but to separate the growth rate of gpu hardware computing power of the new Snapdragon 8 from this large number of new graphics technologies and new optimization solutions?
In our view of Sanyi Life, on the one hand, this reflects a rigorous attitude of large manufacturers in business behavior; on the other hand, it is actually related to the fragmentation of current mobile game technology and the lack of unified standards for game optimization.
As a typical example, we can often see some mobile phone manufacturers talking about it at their launches, with some games undergoing in-depth performance optimizations and so on. Is this normal? Obviously, this is actually an abnormal phenomenon, because the optimization of the game should be a matter between the game developer and the chip manufacturer. For example, in the PC market, there will never be ANY PC manufacturers to engage in any "game co-name optimization", because the same work graphics card driver has long been done.
Obviously, Qualcomm understands this, so we can see that their new platforms in recent years have been emphasizing deep adaptation with game manufacturers and even game engine developers. Take the new Snapdragon 8, which has been deeply adapted to the highest quality and highest frame rate modes of "Glory of Kings", "Peace Elite", "Original God", "Diablo Immortal", and "God of War Relic" and other games.
In addition, Qualcomm has many years of deep cooperation with upstream game engine manufacturers such as Unity and Unreal. For example, in Unreal Engine 4, the optimized Snapdragon platform can improve performance by 60% compared to the default situation, not to mention that the Snapdragon platform will be directly adapted to the new Unreal 5 Mobile engine in the future, which also means that they are very likely to continue to lead the industry's highest standards of actual frame rate and fluency in the new batch of ultra-high-quality mobile games in the future.
Of course, deeply investigating the reasons behind this, we can say that because Qualcomm is the only chip company in the Android camp that has the ability to develop its own GPU architecture and write its own GPU driver, which allows them to do a lot of deep optimization that other manufacturers that use public GPU solutions can't do. We can also say that since the Snapdragon S4 and Snapdragon 600 series many years ago, Qualcomm has been clearly taking "mobile game performance" as an important direction for chip design. Whether it is in the new Snapdragon 8 or the Snapdragon G3x designed for "professional game equipment", it can actually be clearly appreciated.