14 DAY TRIAL // Not many were expecting AMD’s old low-power Radeon technology to eventually beat Nvidia’s top performing Tegra 3. Qualcomm has worked really hard on their Adreno series of mobile iGPUs, but the customers still view them as the second best to Nvidia’s mobile GeForce.
Once Qualcomm’s Adreno 320 hits the market this month, things are going to change quite dramatically.
We know that Nvidia has no plans to release Tegra 4 this year and this means that, at least for the back-to-school season and the winter holydays, Qualcomm will actually have the most powerful mobile GPU on the market.
Hardware experts at Anandtech.com have managed to test LG’s Optimus G phone, which is powered by Qualcomm’s APQ 8064 quad-core Krait mobile processor and also sports the new Adreno 320 iGPU.
A quick test in the well-known GLBenchmark has revealed that the new mobile GPU from Qualcomm is over two and a half times faster than Nvidia’s mobile GeForce inside Tegra 3.
Sure, the new chip is built in 28nm technology, but the thing is that Qualcomm did not clock the iGPU at a high frequency to get an impressive performance.
Instead, the company went for a moderate frequency that leads to better battery life and even so, it manages to beat Nvidia’s Tegra 3.
On the other hand, Imagination Technologies might see its Rogue IP implemented before this year’s end and then Adreno 320 will finally have some real competition even before the Tegra 4 launch.
Tegra 4 is expected in 2013 and the projected performance goal is to be around ten times faster than the current Tegra 3.
