According to ARM community, mobile GPU has seen a progression in Graphics capabilities by a whopping 300% in the last 6 years alone and that is a major breakthrough for mobile graphics and visual computing. Earlier smartphones were limited to really low resolution and limited number of polygon fill rate and that was just 6 years ago. However, now in 2018 smartphones are equipped with faster SOC’s like Qualcomms Snapdragon 821+ series, we will discuss more about these GPU and how manufactures are adding 25–30% performance boost in every iteration of new SOC announcements.
Lets start with understanding a SOC, so what is SOC? SOC stands for System On a chip. A SOC integrates computer components in a smaller substrate or form factor. So right now your phone is rocking a SOC which contains a processor, caching memory, RAM and GPU. These are now being designed together so that you as a user can get higher clock speeds and performing more Millions of Instructions per second also known as MIPS. Chip manufactures like Qualcomm, ARM Holdings etc have brought the fastest possible mobile SOC’s in the hands of consumers. These SOC’s in your phone gives every human being a great tool and power of communication, a source of information and much more just a tap away. Now, with new and emerging technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality can put a lot of pressure on the GPU based on the complexity and number of polygons of a virtual environment. Below is a sample shot of our scene from one of our clients rendered with both Real Time and pre computed graphics.
Now the above scene contains more than 200K vertices and triangles, HDR and Physically Based Rendering running on a Exynos 7420 processor in real time. For more demos click on this link.
If we are able to render this on an older SOC, possibilities are endless in newer chips such as Qualcomm 845 chip as it will be able to handle more complex polygons, lighting, shadows and post- processing shaders (YES post processing effects are shaders). To know more about shaders and how VirtualSpaces custom shaders perform on Mobile GPU’s. Watch out this link.
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