By Andrei Frumusanu on February 8, 2021
GPU Performance & Power: Very, Very Hot
Moving onto the GPU side of things, I was very intrigued coming into this comparison, as both Qualcomm as well as Samsung LSI had made promises of enormous performance upgrades in the range of 35% and 40% respectively. We didn’t exactly know how Qualcomm achieved these performance gains given this year’s rather opaquer reveal of the Snapdragon 888. On the Exynos side, I was immediately dubious about Samsung’s 40% claim given that the new Mali-G78 was only meant to be a small generational performance and efficiency boost, as well as the process node having only a 20% power efficiency gain, however the Exynos 990 was in a bad position so maybe it was possible to achieve. Given a lack of large architectural as well as process node improvements, the large performance improvements must thus come from large power increases.
Starting off with Basemark GPU, we’re off to a mixed start. Both the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100 notably outperform their predecessors in terms of peak performance, however their sustained performances on the Galaxy S21 Ultra isn’t too great.
