Qualcomm may be able to redefine the generation cycle of mobile gaming.
Console gamers must be familiar with the term "next generation," which not only represents better game performance, but also means that a new wave of games is coming. But in the mobile gaming space, it seems difficult to specifically divide the stages of generations.
After the launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8, the 4-year Adreno 600 series that was used was upgraded to the Adreno 700 series, and compared with the previous generation, the Adreno GPU graphics rendering capability of the Snapdragon 8 was increased by 30%, and the energy efficiency during gaming was increased by 25%. It also provides several optimizations for the Vulkan graphics driver, resulting in up to 60% improvement in mobile gaming performance. Perhaps this time, we can also define a "next generation" for the mobile game ecosystem, and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 is the starting point of the next generation.
Coincidentally, the development cycle of an AAA mobile game, usually 2-4 years, coincides with the iteration cycle of the architecture. This is just the fact that games that were called "test software" in the previous generation will run without pressure on models such as the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro with a new generation of chips.
But after all, the mobile phone is different from the game console, whether it is the overall game ecology or the iteration cycle of the machine is more agile, Qualcomm will launch new technologies every year to enhance the game experience, it can be said that to some extent, mobile gamers are much happier than the host gamers, at least without waiting too long, you can continue to get a higher quality game experience.
Patrick Perkins, Senior Marketing Manager for Qualcomm Products, introduced Qualcomm Adreno GPUs to reacquaint themselves with Snapdragon Elite Gaming
It's easy to overlook that Qualcomm is not only one of the world's largest mobile phone SoC producers, but also one of the largest mobile platform GPUs. In the 15 years from 2005 to 2020, the cumulative shipment of Qualcomm Adreno GPU graphics chips has exceeded 2.5 billion.
Just as when we mention PC game graphics cards, we will think of Nvidia and its series of technologies such as light chasing, DLSS, G-SYNC and so on, when playing mobile games, we should also pay attention to Qualcomm's Adreno series of GPUs and its series of technology updates.
Since Qualcomm first exhibited ChinaJoy in 2018, announcing that the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform is inextricably linked to the excellent game experience, a series of measures have since made the game performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips move from the backstage to the front of the stage, step by step occupying the dominant position in mobile games.
Four months after the end of ChinaJoy in August 2018, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 855 flagship chip, and with it came a new term: Snapdragon Elite Gaming.
Snapdragon Elite Gaming is not a technology, but a collection of technical features, to the fourth generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming on snapdragon 8 has covered more than 50 technical features, representing not only mobile phones have a smooth, HDR and end-game level game experience, but also represents the formation of a new game ecology, Qualcomm and game developers, game engines, OEMs can work more closely around the Snapdragon mobile platform.
It is also the emergence of Snapdragon Elite Gaming that has given birth to the new category of "gaming phones". In a careful comparison of Android and iOS' focus on game technology, it will be found that in fact, these are two completely different development paths for mobile games, one is in the closed ecology, re-optimizing and re-moving attributes, and the other is the open ecology, the pursuit of the end-level game experience of the route.
On the snapdragon Elite Gaming of the 2018 Snapdragon 855, Qualcomm rolled out PBR (physically based rendering), a surface shading technology already used in PC games, to mobile platforms. Thanks to the fact that PBR simulates light in a more physics-like way, this rendering method is more realistic than the original Phong or Bnon-Phong lighting algorithms.
In the second-generation Snapdragon Elite Gaming of the 2019 Snapdragon 865, the emergence of Game Smoother 2.0 technology allows mobile games to support frame rates beyond 60FPS and reach 90, 120 or even 144FPS. In turn, it has led to the innovation of the mobile phone screen refresh rate.
It also brings a series of desktop-level features, including end-level forward rendering, including depth-of-field, dynamic light, dynamic shadows, motion blur, and planar reflection, providing developers with development tools to introduce end-level lighting systems and post-processing capabilities into mobile games.
With the launch of the Snapdragon Elite Gaming in 2020, the third generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming has achieved variable resolution rendering (VRS) for the first time. This feature allows developers to better allocate graphics resources and reduce GPU workloads. As well as the new Game Quick Touch technology, which reduces touch response time, the ability to reduce touch response time by 15% and 20% in 90FPS and 6OFPS games, respectively, and 10% in high frame rate games with 120FPS.
The fourth generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming, which was adopted on snapdragon 8 this time, has been further strengthened on the previous basis and still continues the purpose of achieving a terminal game experience.
First, another technology that has been commonly used in PC games has been implemented by Qualcomm on mobile platforms, that is, Volutic Rendering, a stereoscopic rendering technology.
In a 3D game engine, spheres, cubes, and all other complex aggregates are made up of triangular patches. The engine will only render the surface of objects, such as spheres, translucent objects, etc. It can be said that the whole world is made up of various empty shells.
Stereoscopic rendering simulates the flow of light inside the object, thus achieving a more shocking and realistic visual effect. The fragment shader returns the last object to see the color of a particular location from a specific perspective. For example, the smoke effects often used in games can make them more vivid and realistic with the blessing of stereoscopic rendering technology.
At the same time, VRS technology has also been further upgraded to VRS Pro. On the basis of VRS, VRS Pro also supports developers to set the rendering resolution based on the screen position, which can render large and small pixel groups more efficiently.
VRS Pro provides game developers with finer granular control over tuning game performance without sacrificing visual quality. Game content creators can decide which specific parts of the environment need to apply VRS. For example, if the player's attention is focused on a nearby temple, developers can improve energy efficiency and performance by allocating fewer resources to distant plants.
In order to achieve the seemingly contradictory needs of high frame rate and low power consumption at the same time, Qualcomm has introduced a new Adreno image motion engine for the fourth generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming. By leveraging historical frame data and GPU optimization motion estimation, games that support this feature can generate more frames, allowing games to run at double frame rates while maintaining nearly the same power consumption.
In fact, we can see from the addition of three new technologies of stereoscopic rendering technology, VRS Pro, and Adreno image motion engine that Qualcomm is trying to achieve a balance between quality and power consumption. After all, mobile phones cannot be compared with end-game in terms of heat dissipation and endurance, and the proposition of bringing end-game-level experience to mobile phones is like dancing with shackles.
The addition of new technologies can certainly reconcile quality and power consumption, but on the other hand, the optimization of the game itself is also very important.
This time, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon Game Toolkit (Snapdragon Game Toolkit) to help developers develop games more efficiently.
At the same time, Qualcomm is also working with The current mainstream game engine company Unity and Epic Games, the developer of Unreal Engine, to port the Unity game engine and Unreal Engine to the Android field.
This year Qualcomm developed a proprietary optimization for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion in Unreal Engine. This is the technology that AAA games focus on when simulating ambient light interactions in an environment. Compared to the UE4 standard scheme, this optimization can improve performance by more than 60%.
Snapdragon Elite Gaming in many aspects at the same time, as far as possible to provide a high-quality platform to achieve the purpose of the terminal game level experience, and the final effect can reach the upper limit of the chip itself, or depends on the integration and optimization capabilities of OEMs such as Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO in the whole machine.
As the first wave of top-stream mobile phone manufacturers equipped with Snapdragon 8 chips, Xiaomi's newly launched Xiaomi 12 series has undoubtedly become an important part of verifying the strength of Snapdragon 8.
How does Snapdragon 8's gameplay perform?
Snapdragon's flagship chips throughout the ages are often referred to as "performance monsters."
But after Wei Siqi, the former Xiaomi CC and Civi series product manager, took over the responsibility for Xiaomi digital series products, this Xiaomi 12 series did not look like a monster at all. The four colors of black, blue, purple and wild green are fresher, flattering and younger.
In order to cooperate with the improvement of the Snapdragon 8 in terms of ISP, the wide-angle main lens of the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is the first Sony IMX707 sensor, and the rest of the ultra-wide angle and telephoto lenses are Samsung JN1 sensors, all three lenses are 50 million pixels. It can be said that after the Snapdragon 8 was upgraded to an 18-bit ISP, the design of the rear three main cameras can really play its original role.
From the appearance and photography aspects of the first experience, you can feel that the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is far more hardcore than expected. Underneath the youthful exterior, is the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro's armor for the Snapdragon 8.
The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro features a three-stage sandwich structure. In order to exert the full strength of the Snapdragon 8, this "armor" is composed of graphite heat sinks, copper foil, silicone grease and multi-layered 2900mm large area VC vaporizers and other materials.
In terms of CPU, in performance mode, xiaomi 12 pro room temperature antu rabbit running score measured 1.01 million, GeekBench 5 single-core 1142, multi-core 3674.
In terms of GPU, in performance mode, GFXbench Aztec Ruin tested that at 1440P resolution, it can run out of 40 frames, and at 1080P resolution, the frame rate has also successfully exceeded 100, reaching 110 frames, an increase of more than 50% compared with the previous generation.
In the Vulkan test, this score will continue to rise, at 1440P resolution, it can run out of 45 frames, and at 1080P resolution, it reaches 123 frames, even surpassing the A15 equipped with the iPhone 13.
The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro supports three different operating modes: Balanced, Performance and Extreme. for refined performance management.
In order to meet the daily use of the balanced mode, the fuselage temperature can basically be maintained at about 25-30 degrees Celsius at room temperature.
Performance mode, on the other hand, is ideal for professional-grade gaming experiences with higher image quality or higher frame rates. It can be stable at 120FPS in Glory of Kings, but the temperature will also rise to around 40 degrees Celsius.
The Ultimate Mode is set for the terminal game experience, so that AAA mobile games can also run at 60 frames with high image quality and stability. Surprisingly, even in extreme mode, the temperature has only risen to about 44 degrees Celsius, which is still within the acceptable range and does not feel too hot.
Each game can also be fine-tuned for each game in Game Tuner. By default, there are four settings: Standard, Power Saving, Equalization, High Quality, and a custom gear. In the custom settings, players can set their own detailed parameter settings such as frame rate, resolution, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, texture filtering quality, etc., which are no different from our experience on the end game.
This is actually an Adreno GPU control panel feature introduced in the previous generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming. Players will be able to customize key GPU parameters in the game and play the way they like.
Overall, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro equipped with the Snapdragon 8 chip has been quite handy in the face of the "previous generation" of games, just like the Snapdragon 8 will be set for the future on the 18-bit ISP in terms of imagery, and it has taken another step closer to the end game experience in terms of game performance.
Qualcomm's dedication to top games is limited to mobile phones and tablet platforms. The Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 (the first generation of Snapdragon G3x game platform) for handheld gaming devices launched with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has opened up a new direction in the field of mobile games.
The Snapdragon G3x is perhaps the product that best embodies the essence of Snapdragon Elite Gaming. You can no longer be bound by the design ID caused by the category of "mobile phone", you can design more heat dissipation space and heat dissipation devices, and you can use a larger screen to display HDR pictures.
In games, an immersive sound experience is also very important. Qualcomm has partnered with Audiokinetic and Wwise software to process by transferring the CPU task of audio processing to a Qualcomm Hexagon processor. This will free up the CPU load, enabling it to deliver better audio quality with features such as ultra-high sound quality sound and 360-degree spatial audio. On the Snapdragon G3x, OEMs have more room to set up better speakers to bring out the audio immersion provided by Snapdragon Elite Gaming.
Every year, Qualcomm brings new technologies and new experiences to the mobile gaming market. Since the launch of Snapdragon Elite Gaming, it has only passed the first 4 years, and the Snapdragon G3x has only launched the first generation, and even the specific model has not yet appeared. The "next generation" of mobile games started by Qualcomm has just begun.