Dual Core Snapdragon GPU Performance Explored - 1.5 GHz MSM8660 and Adreno 220 Benchmarks

GLBenchmark 2.0

GLBenchmark 2.0 – as its name implies – tests OpenGL ES 2.0 performance on compatible devices across multiple software platforms. The suite includes two long benchmarking scenarios with a demanding combination of OpenGL ES 2.0 effects - texture based and direct lighting, bump, environment, and radiance mapping, soft shadows, vertex shader based skinning, level of detail support, multi-pass deferred rendering, noise textures, and ETC1 texture compression. In addition, there's a large suite of subtests and feature tests.

GLBenchmark 2.0 is the best example of an even remotely current 3D game running on this class of hardware–even then this is a bit of a stretch. GLBenchmark 2.0 is still our current go-to test as it is our best best for guaging real world performance, even across different mobile OSes. Keep in mind that with GLBenchmark 2.0 we still cannot run at any resolution than native – in this case 800x480 (WVGA) – and the same applies for other devices in the suite, they're all at respective native resolutions. GLBenchmark 3.0 will fix this somewhat with the ability to render into an off-screen buffer of arbitrary size.

We never formally reviewed the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G, but have one nonetheless and have included it in our benchmark numbers a few times. Likewise, I purchased an HTC Inspire 4G for personal use which we'll review soon. The importance of these two devices is that they represent the current generation of single-core Snapdragon SoCs with Adreno 205 graphics. Comparatively, the 1.5 GHz MSM8660 with Adreno 220 is 2.2x faster than the 1 GHz MSM8655 with Adreno 205. 

Interestingly enough our run through Egypt came slightly higher with Vsync on than it did off - we're just showing the margin of error here. 

Pro is a less challenging test than Egypt, as it's simply the GLBenchmark 1.x main suite with OpenGL ES 2.0 features and shaders. Already we're at the framerate cap here on both MSM8660 and likely OMAP 4430. Pro likewise demonstrates huge gains from Adreno 205 to Adreno 220 - in this case 3.7x.