Question The best current smartphone GPU is equal in performance to the best desktop GPU of year.....?

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ch33r

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What I want to know is: By how many years is a desktop GPU ahead of a smartphone GPU. For example. The best desktop GPU we have right now is a 2080Ti. In how many years from now will we have smartphone GPUs as powerful as a 2080Ti. How would the best consumer-level smartphone of today compare with like... A radeon HD 3870 or something? How far back would you have to go?
 
Mobile gpus are actually way ahead of desktops... in efficiency. Although I know you want to know about performance and that's probably all that matters. It's not fair when you are talking about maybe just 5w sustained tdp compared to desktop gpus 250w+ plus the size constraints, power constraints, different architecture specifically chosen because of efficiency and design focusing on efficiency vs desktops with less limits and focusing on performance. A 10 year old gtx 285 is equal to a more modern 1030 so you could say a modern gpu is 10 years behind modern gpus. That doesn't make sense. But I'd put performance close to a modern intel igpu which isn't that far off in efficiency.

Performance increase is a percentage of current performance so it'll be parabolic. That means it isn't going to be another 10 years for a low end gpu (1030) to be the same as a past high end gpu (285). So you might be looking at less than 10.
 

ch33r

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Mobile gpus are actually way ahead of desktops... in efficiency. Although I know you want to know about performance and that's probably all that matters. It's not fair when you are talking about maybe just 5w sustained tdp compared to desktop gpus 250w+ plus the size constraints, power constraints, different architecture specifically chosen because of efficiency and design focusing on efficiency vs desktops with less limits and focusing on performance. A 10 year old gtx 285 is equal to a more modern 1030 so you could say a modern gpu is 10 years behind modern gpus. That doesn't make sense. But I'd put performance close to a modern intel igpu which isn't that far off in efficiency.

Performance increase is a percentage of current performance so it'll be parabolic. That means it isn't going to be another 10 years for a low end gpu (1030) to be the same as a past high end gpu (285). So you might be looking at less than 10.

Well, at 10 years difference, that would mean a Samsung Galaxy S10's GPU would be about the same performance (FLOPS, etc etc) as a Radeon HD 3870 or maybe 2950 or something like that.... No???
 

Karadjgne

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Depends on what you use for qualification as 'better'. My Samsung S9+ is currently set at a FHD+ 2220x1080 resolution. Gpus became capable of that in 1999 with DVI. The first smartphone capable of 1080p released to public was the HTC Butterfly at the end of 2012. A 12 year wait. The first 4K smartphone, Sony in 2015. First gpu capable of 4k playback was nvidia 600 series, 2012. Oh, only 3 year wait.

There isn't a pc gpu on the planet as efficient as what's currently in smartphones, hmm 1 up for phones there.

I guess your question could use direction as to what performance really means.
 

ch33r

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Depends on what you use for qualification as 'better'. My Samsung S9+ is currently set at a FHD+ 2220x1080 resolution. Gpus became capable of that in 1999 with DVI. The first smartphone capable of 1080p released to public was the HTC Butterfly at the end of 2012. A 12 year wait. The first 4K smartphone, Sony in 2015. First gpu capable of 4k playback was nvidia 600 series, 2012. Oh, only 3 year wait.

There isn't a pc gpu on the planet as efficient as what's currently in smartphones, hmm 1 up for phones there.

I guess your question could use direction as to what performance really means.

Im not talking about TDP, or efficiency. All that aside, Im only talking about raw numbers... FLOPS, FPS, etc etc.
 

TJ Hooker

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According to Wikipedia, the Adreno 640 GPU (part of the Snapdragon chip used in the galaxy s10) can do 899 GFLOPS FP32. Just look at the wikipedia pages for the various graphics card series from Nvidia and AMD to see what sort of FP32 performance past cards got.
 

boju

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Having the power of a desktop in the palm of your hand would be awesome. Imagine how easy lan parties would be and all youd have to do is cast to a tele or monitor and connect m&k.

My magic ball tells me we won't see anything like this until the 3rd industrial revolution.
 

TJ Hooker

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Having the power of a desktop in the palm of your hand would be awesome. Imagine how easy lan parties would be and all youd have to do is cast to a tele or monitor and connect m&k.

My magic ball tells me we won't see anything like this until the 3rd industrial revolution.
I mean, that's already occurred many times over. Our phones today are more than capable of playing old games that would have been considered AAA titles.

If you're talking about the day when cell phones are as powerful as contemporaneous desktops, I don't see why that would ever happen. Desktops will always have better power and/or cooling available, so I'd hope they'd always have a performance advantage.
 
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boju

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I mean, that's already occurred many times over. Our phones today are more than capable of playing old games that would have been considered AAA titles.

If you're talking about the day when cell phones are as powerful as contemporaneous desktops, I don't see why that would ever happen. Desktops will always have better power and/or cooling available, so I'd hope they'd always have a performance advantage.

Yeah, i hope desktops remain consequential and stationery to avoid being accidentally dumped in a toilet right when you were about to win a battle royale game. That's probably happening now 😁 I prefer desktops and hope they stay forever.

Performance desktops needing the space to cool is what is needed atm and is what we're used to. To fathom something different on the same level i reckon could be possible one day when R&D isn't so expensive.
 
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Karadjgne

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Equality will never happen. Think of it this way. A race car uses a V8 engine, with a very large amount of CC's and a huge air intake and gas need to provide the 1000HP+ it needs. You are asking if a lawnmower engine will ever match that horsepower. Maybe one day it will, but by that time, race cars will be putting out 10k HP.
 
Gflops isn't an indication of actual performance. You can even look at desktop vs desktop gpus of the same gen and they can have very different performance that are not even close to what gflops say. They're useless calculated numbers. Modern gpus have different capabilities like hevc, dx12, etc so it's better to compare to modern gen that's why I would rather compare to an intel igpu than a gpu that's 10 years old. If they can't even play the same game, how can they be compared on the same playing field? There's also the difference in the hardware like vram speed and amount especially amount since there's no way anything would even have 4gb back then. There's also the differences in similar workloads like how some gpus are better than others in the same game. Of course you could do averages but that also can go back to vram amount as you get to modern res and past gpus with just 512mb like the 3870 would drop fps like a rock and you are no longer equivalent.

The direct comparisons of even past gpus to modern gpus is difficult let alone to a completely different platform and architecture. You just won't even be able to other than with theoretical conjecture.
 
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