How does the ipad3 gpu compare to pc gpus?

[T_Yamamoto]

^i beg to differ!
can you oc an iphone?

NOPE!


i can go on and on, but dont want to start a flamewar

 

[Genx87]

People are saying it's more powerful than ps3 or xbox360 so it must be a beast.

Those GPUs were designed in 2004-05. By todays standards I bet Intels integrated GPU is as fast or faster. A low end discreet card would probably blow it away.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Well yeah, Android is terrible.

That's the beauty of android, it can be ANYTHING you want.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Those GPUs were designed in 2004-05. By todays standards I bet Intels integrated GPU is as fast or faster. A low end discreet card would probably blow it away.

Console GPUs work differently from desktop GPUs. Each has it's strengths and while you may be right as far as total processing power goes, the way each technology is implemented makes the difference.

 

[Genx87]

Console GPUs work differently from desktop GPUs. Each has it's strengths and while you may be right as far as total processing power goes, the way each technology is implemented makes the difference.

Sure, compared to a desktop counterpart from 04-06 those GPUs probably shine. This is due to an underlying infrastructure that works for the GPU compared to the blocky standards on the PC. But look at the texture, physics, and shading quality of the consoles. They arent good and suck compared to a desktop GPU of today. Hell, I dont think the xBox360 can render higher than 720p and many games on the PS3 dont go higher than that resolution either.

 

[Cerb]

Those GPUs were designed in 2004-05. By todays standards I bet Intels integrated GPU is as fast or faster. A low end discreet card would probably blow it away.

Low-end discrete cards today are only just reaching that performance level, many are still slower, and basically for the same reason the phones are going to remain slower: bandwidth and FLOPS eat pins, power, and die space. Anything any gamer would buy, however, will easily blow them away.

 

[Smartazz]

Well yeah, Android is terrible.

I love my Droid X, but some software updates are absolutely terrible. For a while I had no 3G coverage until I restarted the phone a good five times. From a hardware perspective, the phone is extremely durable, the battery life is amazing and I love the large screen. Not sure what phone to get when I'm due for an upgrade in a few months.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Here's how I think they stand. Based on that GMA 600 which is a 400MHz SGX535 gets ~150 in 3DMark06, and how Smart/Tab GPUs stand in GLBench,

SGX535 @ 200MHz = 80
SGX535 @ 400MHz) = 150
SGX540 @ 300MHz = 220
SGX540 @ 400MHz = 280
SGX545 @ 400MHz = 280
Mali 400MP @ ?? = 360
SGX545 @ 640MHz = 450
SGX543MP2 @ 250MHz(iPad 2) = 750
SGX543MP4 @ 250MHz(iPad 2012) = 1400
AMD Radeon 6250(C-30) = 1500+

Beyond 2000 points it becomes too CPU sensitive but it gives a relative idea of their performance.

 

[kami]

Here's a screenshot I took of real racing 2 which they updated to render in 2048x1536. Now all they need to do is add some higher res textures to take advantage of double the ram.
http://i.minus.com/iTWJslfKAIRIR.jpg
It does look tack sharp on a 10 inch screen though, that's for sure. I think it's crazy a tablet can render a 3d game at this res at 30fps.

Also a shot of the mass effect game http://i.minus.com/iIu0ex5PtY92d.jpg

 

[BoFox]

The only practical spec you can compare is compute performance; since PowerVR is a TBDR, trying to compare ROPs or even texturing is going to be difficult at best.

To that end, at the low end the SGX543MP4 @ 32GFLOPs would be comparable to 2008's GeForce 9300 GS (G98), which is at 33GFLOPs. At the high end, the only time there has ever been a high-end GPU with that little performance was at the very start of the DX9 era; the Radeon 9700 Pro in 2002 could do 34GFLOPs, but that was a non-unified shader architecture.

Memory bandwidth is also very lopsided; the 9700 Pro had 3 times the memory bandwidth (and that was without having to share it with a CPU), and it only gets worse from there.

The SGX543MP4 is very powerful for a SoC GPU, but SoCs are perpetually 10-15 years behind desktop components. So by that metric we've just reached the point where we can play Jedi Knight II on a SoC.

Virge, didn't know that you knew so much about GPU stuff! That's nice to see another mod besides BFG10K who's very knowledgeable. Cool!

Your post was nice, thanks.. hope you could post some more.

So, it's like Geforce 4 Ti 4600 pretty much (able to play Doom 3 @ 800x600 30fps Medium settings, or HL2 high DX8.1 settings @ 1024x768)?

(EDIT, I'm still kinda new here with little exposure, so I don't know about the other mods.. I just read a thread saying that one mod didn't know much about AMD and NV (that was Dr. Pizza saying it about himself in this Guidelines thread http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=225737 but which I remember wrongly to be Virge. Now, I assume that Idontcare and ivorig are also quite educated, of course!? Duh me!)

 

[imaheadcase]

No 10 hours.

He said compared to a desktop GPU. You can't run it with everything on with a PC game for 10 hours without draining it like whoah.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Here's a screenshot I took of real racing 2 which they updated to render in 2048x1536. Now all they need to do is add some higher res textures to take advantage of double the ram.
http://i.minus.com/iTWJslfKAIRIR.jpg
It does look tack sharp on a 10 inch screen though, that's for sure. I think it's crazy a tablet can render a 3d game at this res at 30fps.

Also a shot of the mass effect game http://i.minus.com/iIu0ex5PtY92d.jpg

I play RR2 on my 3gs. Absolutely best racer there is for iOS. I wouldn't expect higher quality textures though. Sure they doubled the ram, but didn't they increase pixel count by around 4x?

 

[Face2Face]

Here's a screenshot I took of real racing 2 which they updated to render in 2048x1536. Now all they need to do is add some higher res textures to take advantage of double the ram.
http://i.minus.com/iTWJslfKAIRIR.jpg
It does look tack sharp on a 10 inch screen though, that's for sure. I think it's crazy a tablet can render a 3d game at this res at 30fps.

Also a shot of the mass effect game http://i.minus.com/iIu0ex5PtY92d.jpg

Looks pretty dang good. I am impressed even with the graphics of the CSR drag racing game on my Ipad2.

 

[thilanliyan]

Thanks guys.

Apple should not hype their products so much.

Apple is in the business of hyping their products...it works very well for them.

People should just not fall for the hype.

 

[Gordon Freemen]

It wouldn't compare to a desktop GPU.

 

[Gordon Freemen]

Apple is in the business of hyping their products...it works very well for them.

People should just not fall for the hype.

The ipod 4 is a good device and the Cinema Display look good but aside from that I agree they fail.

 

[Vesku]

The Kyro PC graphics cards did ok for the brief period they were in the market. Seems like mobile is a good space for that kind of gpu design. Makes it hard to directly compare though, if forced to guess I'd agree with Cerb and say "Zacate-ish".

 

[Blitzvogel]

In relative terms, it's about 1/3 as capable Xenos at best.

I don't know how fast the PSP's SGX543MP4+ is, but if anything, it's ability to emulate some of the quality of PS3 games in terms of graphics comes down to tightly controlling the graphical assets and culling that which is least necessary to the visual experience while running a very aggressive but cleverly disguising LOD scheme. The screen on the Vita is also below 720p, which eases up on the number of pixels in the end that will be displayed.

 

[Red Hawk]

The iPad3 may finally get faster than the slowest PC IGP. Much more than that, and they'll have to kiss their battery life good bye.

I doubt it. Both AMD and Intel have been steadily moving forward with IGPs, and even though IGPs are Intel's weak spot they always put their best IGPs in their mobile processors. So...against $300 Intel Atom netbooks, maybe. But against tablets and ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge? No way.

 

[Cerb]

I doubt it. Both AMD and Intel have been steadily moving forward with IGPs, and even though IGPs are Intel's weak spot they always put their best IGPs in their mobile processors.

Medfield has almost the same GPU as Apple uses in it's ARM SoCs. Their CPUs that need the most efficient don't even get Intel's own designs. The desktop CPUs have IGP every bit as good as notebook chips, though. They're 99% the same CPUs.

So...against $300 Intel Atom netbooks, maybe. But against tablets and ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge? No way.

Maybe, for some IB CPUs. No way has SB reached midrange X1-series performance levels, yet; though it and IB do outdo it in terms of features.

 

[Fox5]

I'd say the iPad 3 GPU is roughly comparable to the C-50 GPU, ie roughly half of an e-350/e-450.

 

[Red Hawk]

Medfield has almost the same GPU as Apple uses in it's ARM SoCs. Their CPUs that need the most efficient don't even get Intel's own designs. The desktop CPUs have IGP every bit as good as notebook chips, though. They're 99% the same CPUs.

Maybe, for some IB CPUs. No way has SB reached midrange X1-series performance levels, yet; though it and IB do outdo it in terms of features.

Medfield is still based on the Atom architecture, which stems from good old Conroe; presumably once Intel brings a Sandy Bridge-based architecture to smartphones it will use Intel's iGPU. And desktop Sandy Bridge processors sometimes use HD Graphics 2000, which has half the shader units of the HD Graphics 3000. All mobile Sandy Bridge processors use HD Graphics 3000 though.

 

[Arkadrel]

People are saying it's more powerful than ps3 or xbox360 so it must be a beast.

That's not true at all.

A5X gpu:
250Mhz
16 4-way 128-bit ALU with multiply-add=64 MAD per clock=32 gigaflops
166 million polygons per second

Xbox 360 GPU
500Mhz
48 4-way 128-bit ALU with multiply-add+48 32-bit scalar ALU=216 gigaflops
500 million polygons per second

And just for comparison

HD 7970
925Mhz
128 16-way 512-bit ALU with multiply-add=3.8 teraflops
1850 million polygons per second.

The new ipad's gpu is a big fish in a small pond, but when compared to the big boys it's really just a minnow.

Pretty awesum right there
So in reality is more like 1/5th of a Xbox or something.

Gotta love Apple hype.

 

[slayernine]

This was probably from a post in the mobile devices & gadgets forum that's been proven to be based on a poorly written article with sloppy journalism. The actual quote is that the new iPad has more memory and a higher resolution than either the PS3 or Xbox 360.

At no point did they claim it was more powerful or had better graphics.

To suggest certain specifications are better than those gaming consoles infers to general consumers that it is better than them. Most people don't understand that having a higher resolution and more available memory does not equal being faster or better.

Apple is a marketing machine of mass perception interference. They also call the iPad a magical device...

 

[Cerb]

Medfield is still based on the Atom architecture, which stems from good old Conroe

Dothan/Pentium-M. It split off before Conroe.

presumably once Intel brings a Sandy Bridge-based architecture to smartphones it will use Intel's iGPU.

Maybe, but I'm not confident enough in even Intel to speculate that they can pull off SB-derived CPUs in phones any time soon. 2020 might even be too soon for that. Alleged specs for Haswell, FI, don't go lower than 35W TDP, which is off by at least an order of magnitude, and process shrinks haven't been giving the greatest power savings lately, by themselves.