GLBenchmark 2.0 Released - Modern SoCs Benchmarked

We're constantly on the lookout for new benchmarks to use for benchmarking the latest SoCs in devices. Today, Kishonti Informatics released GLBenchmark 2.0, the latest version of its popular GLBenchmark suite for measuring 3D graphics performance across a host of platforms: iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Maemo. We've been testing it out for a while now and have some numbers of our own and from the community results. The end result is yet another look at how 3D performance stacks up between nearly all modern SoCs.

GLBenchmark 2.0 - as its name implies - tests OpenGL ES 2.0 performance on compatible devices. The suite includes two long benchmarking scenarios with a demanding combination of OpenGL ES 2.0 effects, and individual tests such as swap buffer speed (for determining the framerate cap), texture fill, triangle, and geometric tests. GLBenchmark 2.0 also leverages 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.

We've been testing devices for a little while now and have a decent enough spread to make for some interesting comparison. The only extra consideration is that all of these were run at the device's respective native resolution. There's no way to change resolution, and likewise numbers cannot be scaled linearly because we may be memory bandwidth limited on some devices. GLBenchmark will join our benchmark suite for devices going forward. 

First are the resolutions (native) of the devices themselves:

Thankfully, comparison across devices running Android is easy thanks to the relatively standard WVGA resolution guidelines for high end devices. 

   The first benchmark, Egypt, tests OpenGL ES 2.0 and represents the newest and most demanding benchmark. The second -  GLBenchmark PRO - represents a suite that tests OpenGL ES 1.1 performance. (edit: GLBenchmark Pro also tests OpenGL ES 2.0 features, and is a port of an earlier GLBenchmark 1.1 test which focused on OpenGL ES 1.1 performance). Moving forward we will report these whenever possible on smartphone reviews. 

It's pretty apparent right now that PowerVR SGX 540 still holds the lead, though the new 45 nm Qualcomms with Adreno 205 are a huge jump forwards from Adreno 200 performance wise. It's interesting that it looks like we're GPU or memory bandwidth bound on those new Qualcomms, as evidenced by the similar results the myTouch 4G and G2 post despite a 200 MHz CPU clock disparity.

Overall, GLBenchmark is designed to showcase some of the OpenGL ES 2.0 features that developers may potentially use in future gaming titles. There are a lot more low level tests which we'll be playing around with in the future and using to test in much more detail.