"I've been playing Kings for more than a dozen seasons. No matter how much the computer game eats, the configuration will not exceed the limit of the 120 frames of the king. ”
"I recently bought a computer, but Steam always can't play, so I thought it would be better to use my phone to play computer games. After all, the phone's Snapdragon 7+ G3 and 16G RAM make it absolutely fine to play computer games. ”
"I searched, the graphics card of the Snapdragon 8 Gen3 is equivalent to 4060, I haven't bought a graphics card, but I think it's not an exaggeration. ”
Recently, a veteran "Honor of Kings" player and mid-range mobile phone user has attracted a lot of attention on social media for his assertion that "the performance of today's mobile phones is generally comparable to that of high-end computers, and mobile phones should easily run computer triple-A masterpieces".
To be honest, from these few words, we can't tell whether he really believes these statements or is deliberately "fishing".
However, after seeing these miraculous statements mentioned above, we feel that it is really necessary to "refute the rumors" of some of these ideas.
Whether the mobile phone CPU can run PC games, in theory, it is really possible
First of all, from the perspective of CPU performance and computing architecture, can today's smartphones theoretically run PC games and real triple-A masterpieces?
Not to mention anything else, at least for us in Sanyi Life, as early as the fall of 2023, we have already experienced the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform running on Windows. With the latest firmware, drivers, and systems, ARM processors are now more effective than ever to "translate" the x86 instruction set.
Although the Snapdragon X Elite uses Qualcomm's self-developed new CPU architecture, which is different from the ARM public version of the current mobile phone, their instruction set is still the same at the bottom layer. So theoretically, the x86 code that Snapdragon X Elite can run can also run on ordinary mobile phone CPUs.
The fact that the Snapdragon X series can run PC software does not mean that mobile phones can also play 3A masterpieces smoothly
But "can run" can only ensure that the program can be opened at most, and does not mean that they can be used normally, let alone ensure that those 3A masterpieces on the PC can really be full of special effects on the mobile phone, smooth operation. The reason for this is also very simple, that is, for the current stage of smartphone SoCs, their memory and GPU performance are still too weak.
Thinking that a phone has a larger memory than a computer? It's just an illusion
Seeing this, some friends may not be convinced. Obviously, there are a lot of mobile phones with 16GB of RAM, and some models even use 24GB of RAM, how can they be worse? Aren't they more RAM than mainstream computers?
Not really. First of all, it is problematic to compare "top mobile phones" with "mainstream computers". Not to mention that the current generation of PC platform memory has already started at 16GB and is popular at 32GB. Even if you take into account the market alignment, the 24GB phone should correspond to the top gaming PCs. And how much RAM should a top-of-the-line gaming PC have at the moment? At least 48GB is the starting point. In other words, in terms of absolute memory capacity, mobile phones today have not really surpassed PCs.
Secondly, in terms of hardware architecture, SoC designs are commonly used in smartphones today. That is, their GPUs and CPUs are integrated and need to "preemptive" the capacity and bandwidth of the memory.
For phones with 16GB of RAM, shared video memory can often take up a lot of content
In this way, even for flagship mobile phone SoCs, whether it is their CPU or GPU, it is actually impossible for them to "eat" the seemingly beautiful memory bandwidth and memory capacity. And this phenomenon for PC, as long as there is a model with a separate display, it will naturally not exist.
The huge gap in GPUs is the key to the poor performance of mobile phones
And when it comes to GPU performance, even today's top-of-the-line smartphones are nowhere near the level of the most entry-level "gaming graphics card" on the PC. Take the third-generation Snapdragon 8, for example, with its Adreno 750 GPU's peak performance at 1GHz (which would have to be achieved by Samsung's custom model) at about 3 Tflops. In comparison, the latest Intel ARC GPUs have a floating-point performance of up to 4.8Tflops.
Even today's top-level mobile phone GPUs have actual computing power that is not as good as PC core graphics, let alone independent graphics
As for the aforementioned RTX4060, as well as the current top-of-the-line RTX 6000 Ada on desktop, their floating-point performance is 15.1 Tflops and 91 Tflops, respectively, which is equivalent to five times and thirty times that of the third-generation Snapdragon 8.
In other words, suppose there is a "hack" that allows a phone to run x86 code on a PC with 100% efficiency in no time. For a game that can run up to 120 FPS on PC, even the strongest smartphone platform may not be able to run it to 10 FPS or even more than 5 FPS with the same visual effects.
To tell the truth, "playing PC masterpieces with mobile phones" is indeed a very beautiful hope, but at least under the current technical conditions, if you do not use "cheating" means such as cloud games, it is impossible to achieve the same picture performance and smoothness experience as high-end game computers with only the computing power of the smartphone itself. After all, the technology related to mobile phones has developed rapidly, but the PC industry has not stood still in recent years. So the idea that "the phone is powerful enough and the PC is unnecessary" is obviously seriously wrong.
Of course, why some mobile gamers have such an idea is actually a very interesting topic in itself.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]