ARM Community: ARM Powered Smartphone Sets New Graphics Benchmark - ARM Community

Taking an in-depth look at all methods used throughout the industry to compare GPU performance in the handset space as well as their accuracy (or lack thereof) is not an easy task. Uniquely this year, the Samsung Galaxy S II with Mali-400 MP according to Engadget and Techradar has unanimously set the highest benchmark score among the currently available smartphones.

Evaluating graphic performance is often a subject of controversy and involves wading in the muddy waters of 3D benchmarking. These days, consumers will often use hardware capabilities to quantify purchasing decisions and tech-savvy buyers will try to reproduce the results that their favourite vendor quotes in their marketing materials. As with all things, choosing the right tools is extremely hard and sometimes applications are selected just because they are easily accessible rather than accurate or useful. While several Android games include a benchmarking mode, some OpenGL ES benchmarks allow a level of configurability usually associated with typical game engines, making them ineffective to compare different platforms with different configuration options. On top of that, you may come across a handful of simplistic and low-complexity tests that aim to break down architectural throughput and provide a thumb in the air analysis of the GPU efficiency.

If you followed the series of excellent blogs from Ed Plowman and Tom Olson taking an in-depth look at fill rate and triangles per second you are probably aware of different aspects of synthetic benchmarking. Some of the results are simply not consistent, or what is even worse, metrics reported by some of the tests might be misleading. Yet, the fundamental aim of measuring graphics capabilities of the GPU is straightforward, which is to give information that can help in determining authentic, achievable performance of a consumer device that is using that particular GPU. For what it's worth, even in the still-emerging mobile benchmarking space, there are well-established industry standard applications that include a high complexity game, UI or navigation test suites that reliably quantify the end user experience.

Focusing on the real life performance rather than theoretical peak numbers was the main principle when designing the ARM Mali-400 MP. ARM has built a balanced GPU for the next generation of mobile platforms such as Samsung Exynos 4210 that could render stereoscopic 3D content at resolutions above 1080p with anti-aliasing enabled. With the new Samsung Galaxy SII superphone this vision became a reality and mobile gaming is swiftly moving into the high-end arena. Handsets, tablets and set-top-boxes that are powered by Mali are pushing performance efficiency to a completely new level that can now be reached within the embedded power and memory bandwidth budget.

If you want to find out what it takes to drive graphics in a handset that was described with comments like “the most powerful mobile handset we've yet tested” and “nothing else on the market that can come close“, have a look at the GLBenchmark web site. You will find several Mali-400 MP powered gadgets there and you can take my marketer's word for it: if you buy one you won’t be disappointed.

Jakub Lamik, Graphics Product Manager, Media Processing Division, ARM. Jakub has spent several years working in the semiconductor industry but still remembers days when he used to type J followed by a double quote to load his favourite game on his ZX Spectrum Plus. On one rainy day, he had to give up his beloved system programming to lead the design of low power 3D graphics accelerators, which he believes is really about “not rendering pixels”. He soon became fascinated with visual computing and nowadays is a product manager looking after ARM Mali GPUs.