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[Q] Galaxy S CPU Performance

I've been reading a lot of discussion on this and would love to hear some opinions and see some benchmarks.
I currently own a Nexus One & where I live they are priced about $150 dollars more for a Nexus than a Galaxy S (It's my understanding Nexus are regarded as cheaper phones in America?) So basically I can sell my 4 month old Nexus One & buy a brand new 16GB Galaxy S for no extra cost. Here is what I am wondering...
I know the Galaxy S has an amazing GPU, it facerolls the Nexus One & even seems to stomp the Droid X with its improved GPU so that is great.
The CPU however seems to under perform in every benchmark I can find versus the Nexus/Droid2 & many more current high end Androids.
I realise these devices are running Android 2.2 with JIT. I've seen Linpacks of 2.2 running Galaxy S devices and JIT enabled ROMs that still don't compare with these other devices.
Question 1
What I'm wondering is the difference we can see in CPU benchmarks going to be surpassed with the addition of a proper 2.2 JIT rom on our devices or is simply that the Snapdragons & other Qualcomm CPU are actually better than our Hummingbird.
Question 2
My Nexus One is Linkpacking 30 MFlops atm, I think with OC etc I can get it higher too. Does anyone have any evidence of a Galaxy S phone (running 2.2, JIT, lagfix or anything) that competes (or even comes close to competing) with this? I have been unable to find anything.
Question 3
Is the current Quadrant scores that I'm seeing people reporting in the Lag Fix threads (2000+) actually representative of speed or are these (as Cyanogen & others seem to be claiming) distorted?
(I realise a lot of people are reporting lag fixed.. what I'm asking is the number represented there (x2 N1 Froyo's score) actually accurate. I don't understand the mechanics behind the I/O benchmark so I don't understand if the lagfix is distoring the reported results from it.)

1. Hummingbird is apparently faster.
2. We don't have JIT yet.. Compare Nexus One 2.1/Eclair with Galaxy S 2.1, and I remember seeing we are faster.. JIT has a massive impact on mflops (because the benchmark uses bytecode, not compiled code).
3. No benchmark is really representative of speeds (no matter what people tell you). Because different apps have different workloads. You might get 50mflops in a CPU test, but for 3D games, the number of triangles matters more. It has recently been shown the I/O test for quadrant can be tricked too.
Benchmarks aren't really comprehensive enough for anything more than getting an idea of the performance.. But don't rely on them.

The reason why we get crappy benchmarks is due to having ****ty filesystem (rfs) which don't let us have multi writes. That's what lag fixes help. Cpu wise we eat snapdragons for breakfast, lunch and tea.
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andrewluecke said:
1. Hummingbird is apparently faster.
2. We don't have JIT yet.. Compare Nexus One 2.1/Eclair with Galaxy S 2.1, and I remember seeing we are faster.. JIT has a massive impact on mflops (because the benchmark uses bytecode, not compiled code).
3. No benchmark is really representative of speeds (no matter what people tell you). Because different apps have different workloads. You might get 50mflops in a CPU test, but for 3D games, the number of triangles matters more. It has recently been shown the I/O test for quadrant can be tricked too.
Benchmarks aren't really comprehensive enough for anything more than getting an idea of the performance.. But don't rely on them.
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what he said ^^^
regards

ickyboo said:
The reason why we get crappy benchmarks is due to having ****ty filesystem (rfs) which don't let us have multi writes.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk
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Source please.. I never have actually seen anyone prove this here, but I hear it being thrown around increasingly. How was this proven? I'm becoming increasingly concerned that this conclusion was made by playing chinese whispers

andrewluecke said:
Source please.. I never have actually seen anyone prove this here, but I hear it being thrown around increasingly. How was this proven? I'm becoming increasingly concerned that this conclusion was made by playing chinese whispers
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Well, if you look at pre-Froyo benchmarks of Snapdragon devices, they generally get around 6.1 in Linpack, vs ~8.4 for a Galaxy S. That's a pretty big delta, and carriers through most other synthetic and real world benchmarks, roughly 20% faster at the same clock speed. Same thing can be seen with the TI processors in the Droid line, at 1Ghz, they score in the 8's with 2.1.
Froyo benchmarks are suspect for a number of reasons, mainly because most of the benchmarks were designed with 1.6-2.1 in mind, and partly because Google spent a lot of time optimizing the base Froyo build for a Snapdragon processor. HTC, Sony, Dell, etc can piggyback off this work with their version, whereas Samsung and Motorola have to start much closer to scratch. Which is also why the HTC devices got Froyo sooner.
Believe it or not (and despite the marketing hype) the Snapdragon chipset is a budget solution, with less complex/expensive memory subsystem, and a far less costly integrated graphics solution than what is found on the Galaxy S.
It's cheap to produce, it has almost everything in a nice tidy package that makes it cheaper to engineer handsets (when I say everything, I mean CPU/GPU/Radio/WiFi/GPS/USB).
It's a pretty good package for companies like HTC, who don't do any real hardware engineering, and try to keep costs low. They do software (very very well, I should add), industrial design, and mass manufacturing, but they've NEVER designed a chipset (or display), they always source those from a third party, in this case Qualcom for the chipset, Samsung/Sony for the displays, etc.
However, they were the first to market with 1Ghz speed and it's a solid and stable hardware setup. Just keep in mind that clock speeds don't tell the whole tale.
The Galaxy S, (and to a lesser extent the Droid series) use a better stand-alone CPU solution and a far superior non-integrated (has its own chip) GPU. Samsung does do their own in-house chipset engineering, and they didn't cut corners on the CPU design, and they learned a lot about how to squeeze a lot of performance out of the ARM instruction set from their own products and the work they did for the iPhone processors. In brute-force, they smack the Snapdragon chipset around like a *****, but they get slapped around in turn by HTC's superior software engineering.
HTC has a real advantage in lots and lots of PDA/Smartphone software experience. They know how to make the most of the hardware they purchase, and seem to spend a great deal of time optimizing the software, be it Windows Mobile or Android, and lessons learned from a decade of making PDAs, under their name and for others.
If HTC used a Hummingbird or TI OMAP chipset with PowerVR GPU, I have no doubt they'd be able to more quickly wring more performance and stability out of it than Samsung or Motorola can.

Croak said:
Well, if you look at pre-Froyo benchmarks of Snapdragon devices, they generally get around 6.1 in Linpack, vs ~8.4 for a Galaxy S. That's a pretty big delta, and carriers through most other synthetic and real world benchmarks, roughly 20% faster at the same clock speed. Same thing can be seen with the TI processors in the Droid line, at 1Ghz, they score in the 8's with 2.1.
Froyo benchmarks are suspect for a number of reasons, mainly because most of the benchmarks were designed with 1.6-2.1 in mind, and partly because Google spent a lot of time optimizing the base Froyo build for a Snapdragon processor. HTC, Sony, Dell, etc can piggyback off this work with their version, whereas Samsung and Motorola have to start much closer to scratch. Which is also why the HTC devices got Froyo sooner.
Believe it or not (and despite the marketing hype) the Snapdragon chipset is a budget solution, with less complex/expensive memory subsystem, and a far less costly integrated graphics solution than what is found on the Galaxy S.
It's cheap to produce, it has almost everything in a nice tidy package that makes it cheaper to engineer handsets (when I say everything, I mean CPU/GPU/Radio/WiFi/GPS/USB).
It's a pretty good package for companies like HTC, who don't do any real hardware engineering, and try to keep costs low. They do software (very very well, I should add), industrial design, and mass manufacturing, but they've NEVER designed a chipset (or display), they always source those from a third party, in this case Qualcom for the chipset, Samsung/Sony for the displays, etc.
However, they were the first to market with 1Ghz speed and it's a solid and stable hardware setup. Just keep in mind that clock speeds don't tell the whole tale.
The Galaxy S, (and to a lesser extent the Droid series) use a better stand-alone CPU solution and a far superior non-integrated (has its own chip) GPU. Samsung does do their own in-house chipset engineering, and they didn't cut corners on the CPU design, and they learned a lot about how to squeeze a lot of performance out of the ARM instruction set from their own products and the work they did for the iPhone processors. In brute-force, they smack the Snapdragon chipset around like a *****, but they get slapped around in turn by HTC's superior software engineering.
HTC has a real advantage in lots and lots of PDA/Smartphone software experience. They know how to make the most of the hardware they purchase, and seem to spend a great deal of time optimizing the software, be it Windows Mobile or Android, and lessons learned from a decade of making PDAs, under their name and for others.
If HTC used a Hummingbird or TI OMAP chipset with PowerVR GPU, I have no doubt they'd be able to more quickly wring more performance and stability out of it than Samsung or Motorola can.
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Thanks, that was a really insightful post.
So basically even though our processor should outperform or ATLEAST match the snapdragons. Due to the mass optimization of 2.2 JIT for Snapdragon devices it's likely we'll never see the same performance. Unless Samsung gets really keen to do some optimization themselves.

I searched all over the internet to see why the CPU scores in Quadrant and other benchmarks are waaaay lower then the Nexus ones, but still I can't find anything.
Does Samsung disable the JIT in their Froyo ROMs? Because both Snapdragon and Hummingbird are still based on the same Cortex A8 cores

"It's clear that FroYo's JIT compiler currently only delivers significant performance gains for Snapdragon CPUs with the Scorpion core. This in turn explains why, so far, only a beta version of Android 2.2 is available for the Cortex-A8-based Samsung Galaxy S — the JIT compiler is the outstanding feature of FroYo. For the widespread Cortex-A8 cores, used in many high-end Android smartphones, the JIT compiler needs to be optimised. A Cortex-A8 core will still be slower than a Scorpion core at the same clock speed, but the Scorpion's advantage may not be as much 260 percent."
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http://androidforums.com/samsung-ca...ant-scores-why-humming-bird-doing-so-bad.html

There are multiple reasons, not optimised jit, slow memory for caching and more. Most of them are solved in the CM roms (it performs on par with the N1), and i can tell you that when Gingerbread comes it will blow the snapdragons away.

Which custom ROM provides CPU performance close to Snapdragon?

[ignore this post please]

Still the 1Ghz humming bird out performs the 1Ghz snap in real world performance

Even the LG Optimus One ARM11 600MHz Core scores better than Galaxy S. I still believe it's a software problem.
http://lgoptimusonep500.blogspot.com/2011/01/custom-rom-for-lg-optimus-one-p500.html#more
Another benchmark:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4126/nokia-http://www.anandtech.com/show/4126/nokia-n8-review-/7
...where the Nexus S proves that the Hummingbird can do more than it currrently does in Galaxy S.

Is the captivate as awesome as it appears in quadrant after the lag fix?

I have the captivate with bloatware removed, unhelpful's overclock kernel, and the lag fix, I get quadrant scores as high as 2505. I was wondering if the phone its just that awesome or if there were similar mods to snapdragon phones that give them similar performance. i know they can be overclocked.
I guess what I'm getting at is that my phone would hang on the file system tests in quadrant until the lag fix where the score nearly tripled! Is this something unique to the galaxy s do to a flaw or are there similar problems on other phones that could be fixed and yield similar performance to my phone? Or is the galaxy s cpu, gpu and ram and other components just that much better?
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897

My $0.02 says the galaxy s as a processing unit is slightly better than the older snapdragon. Better optimised, newer (45nm > 60nm) etc. There could very well be processing issues on other chips too. We wont know until someone finds them. Bear in mind however, the Snapdragon chips are likely to be much better optimised for android operating systems - as android is developed on that reference hardware - e.g. nexus one uses a quallcomm snapdragon and gets a massive jump with JIT, froyo. However, droid X, Droid 2 with froyo dont see nearly as high increases in performance.
The GPU is known to be significantly better on the Galaxy S phones. However, its only a matter of time before the next gen snapdragons take the lead again (or at least play catch up)....and somehow I wont be surprised if the subsequent Galaxy S 2 devices retake the lead

Pretty much what I was thinking, from what I understand the snapdragon has up to 20% greater throughput than a standard arm v7 processor but the hummingbird needs 15-25% fewer instructions to do the same task. I wish I could remember the reference for that. In other words, snapdragon works harder and hummingbird works smarter.
I knew as far a shear performance it would come down to the gpu but didn't know any details on that.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897

The issue that slows the Galaxy models is Samsung's proprietary file system. The lagfix improves performance by wedging in between the filesystem and providing a buffer built with a modern filesystem.

The massive score increase in Quadrant is due to the file IO being MUCH MUCH faster when the lag fix is applied. If you were to look at the professional version of Quadrant (which breaks down the scores into their categories) the File I/O portion would be in the mid to high 6000's, which really unbalances the score..

[Q] Galaxy S and HTC Desire HD Linpack

Even though the HTC desire HD and Galaxy s have the processor with 1Ghz clock speed their linpack scores vary. SGS has about 12-14 and HTC Desire HD has 35-38. Also the same case with Nexus One. Can someone help me with this dilema?

vivekrk44 said:
Even though the HTC desire HD and Galaxy s have the processor with 1Ghz clock speed their linpack scores vary. SGS has about 12-14 and HTC Desire HD has 35-38. Also the same case with Nexus One. Can someone help me with this dilema?
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Simple. Linpack is optimised for snapdragon processors. I'm sure if you searched you could have solved this by yourself.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

And it's a synthetic benchmark anyway. Benchmarks are only useful if you know what exactly they are testing, they produce verbose outputs and if they test similar workloads to what you normally perform. Linpack is only somewhat useful if you only care about the speed floating point operations.
By the way, please stop saying it's optimised for snapdragon! To the best of what I've heard, that isn't the case. Snapdragons simply handle floating points better apparently. So yes, it might run better on snapdragon, but the developer probably didn't shift through the Dalvik code finding ways to speed it up on snapdragon.
We still don't really have enough information to understand if Snapdragon or hummingbird are faster in most applications, because we don't have an application similar to PCmark

Auzy said:
We still don't really have enough information to understand if Snapdragon or hummingbird are faster in most applications, because we don't have an application similar to PCmark
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I know for a fact that in the "real world" the Desire HD $hits all over the SGS... I have both devices, and its very clear that the lag kills the SGS experience.
Its also worth noting, the Desire HD has the more optimised rev II Snapdragon processor. Clock for clock vs original Snapdragon, rev II is about 25% quicker...
PS - It is a shame tho, the Desire HD does not have native DIVX player support. You have to download Rockplayer for $10 to get that..

cheetah2k said:
I know for a fact that in the "real world" the Desire HD $hits all over the SGS... I have both devices, and its very clear that the lag kills the SGS experience.:
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The lag is caused by the internal memory and file system though, not the Hummingbird.

cheetah2k said:
You have to download Rockplayer for $10 to get that..
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eum. Rockplayer is free.

cheetah2k said:
I know for a fact that in the "real world" the Desire HD $hits all over the SGS... I have both devices, and its very clear that the lag kills the SGS experience.
Its also worth noting, the Desire HD has the more optimised rev II Snapdragon processor. Clock for clock vs original Snapdragon, rev II is about 25% quicker...
PS - It is a shame tho, the Desire HD does not have native DIVX player support. You have to download Rockplayer for $10 to get that..
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How does the desire HD handle 3D games? When i went to the HTC event in London, it wasnt really very impressive when it came to the 3D games, the SGS was clearly superior thanks to its PowerVR 540 GPU.

cheetah2k said:
I know for a fact that in the "real world" the Desire HD $hits all over the SGS... I have both devices, and its very clear that the lag kills the SGS experience.
Its also worth noting, the Desire HD has the more optimised rev II Snapdragon processor. Clock for clock vs original Snapdragon, rev II is about 25% quicker...
PS - It is a shame tho, the Desire HD does not have native DIVX player support. You have to download Rockplayer for $10 to get that..
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For starters, the question was based on linpack, but you are comparing the overall device. The software has already been shown to have a large impact on the devices. Furthermore, it's running bytecode, so it depends on the dalvik implementation.Your "facts" are actually non-conclusive, and seem to be based on observations.
Secondly, 25% faster isn't enough info when you don't know how hummingbird is in comparison. And even that is total crock, because 25% under which workload? It's like saying that a mechanical harddisk is half as fast as an SSD. However, under which conditions? We KNOW that mechanical HDD's operate horribly with random access. Well, what conditions have been improved on the scorpion CPU?
The harsh reality is, we don't know how exactly they compare, and benchmarks like Linpack or Quadrant only provide a tiny picture. It's more important to identify what kind of operations you need, and test those operations specifically. What we should ask is why you care about linpack?
I'm interested in finding out how the CPU's perform exactly though honestly (even against snapdragon).

What I've seen on quadrant is that it tests all aspects of a cpu. Arithmetic of int, short, long, xml parsing, audio and video decoding and the nexus one still has a better score only in cpu. Nexus one has about 4500 and my sgs has a max of 1992. Dosent this provide the big picture?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

get CyanogenMod in SGS and try again

vivekrk44 said:
What I've seen on quadrant is that it tests all aspects of a cpu. Arithmetic of int, short, long, xml parsing, audio and video decoding and the nexus one still has a better score only in cpu. Nexus one has about 4500 and my sgs has a max of 1992. Dosent this provide the big picture?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
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The big picture of what exactly? That quadrant doesn't give accurate results when comparing phones? This thread is a waste of time

There's been a topic about this before. To get a proper comparison of actual MFLOPS performance of both devices, we'd need to make a comparison that is not hampered by different versions of Android software, different Linux kernels or different levels of JIT optimization.
To properly compare them, you could load Ubuntu (same version) on both devices, and have them run a properly optimized version of native UNIX Linpack. That'd actually be testing the hardware capabilities. Native UNIX Linpack runs 62+ on the iPad's 1 GHz Apple A4 (of which the execution core is said to be identical to the Hummingbird) which is over four times as much as we're getting on Android Linpack on the Hummingbird.
I'd be happy to volunteer my Galaxy S, but we'd need someone with a Snapdragon phone to do the same.

vivekrk44 said:
What I've seen on quadrant is that it tests all aspects of a cpu. Arithmetic of int, short, long, xml parsing, audio and video decoding and the nexus one still has a better score only in cpu. Nexus one has about 4500 and my sgs has a max of 1992. Dosent this provide the big picture?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
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Nope.. Because as mentioned, it still goes through the VM, and you are looking at a weighted score or does it show every component individually? Also, when you say "all aspects of the CPU", how do you know it's all aspects. The fact you mention XML parsing as a proper test is silly, because it's basic string operations (array of numbers generally).
You also forget that Android is a timesharing OS, so background processes can have an effect. When I say the overall view, I mean a total breakdown of the CPU, cache, average cycles taken for specific instructions, etc.
You can't test the CPU with Dalvik, or even the NDK. And in the case of Linpack as mentioned, it's a very specific workload. There might be CPU specific workloads which hummingbird performs significantly faster than the other processors (we don't know). All that should matter to you, is how well your apps run.

As all the smart people have said, don't trust benchmarks and also Froyo's JIT compiler isn't yet optimized for hummingbird, That will change once google plays around with the nexus s.

Droid/Milestones' weak graphic performance. OC possible?

The Droid2/X use the same graphic processor as Droid 1, which is PowerVR SGX 530. According to the datasheet, this core is designed to run at 200Mhz with power of rendering 14M triangles/sec. But our Droid/Milestone runs underclocked at 110Mhz(7M tri/s) while D2/X at 200Mhz. That leads to major UI responsiveness&gaming difference between D2&D1.
I wonder if there's any possibility to overclock the GPU as well?
Thanks in advance.
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App

TeroZ said:
The Droid2/X use the same graphic processor as Droid 1, which is PowerVR SGX 530. According to the datasheet, this core is designed to run at 200Mhz with power of rendering 14M triangles/sec. But our Droid/Milestone runs underclocked at 110Mhz(7M tri/s) while D2/X at 200Mhz. That leads to major UI responsiveness&gaming difference between D2&D1.
I wonder if there's any possibility to overclock the GPU as well?
Thanks in advance.
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App
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As far as I know this has been tried (overclocking), but with no results (constant reboots)

Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) defines the GPU internals and sells the "plans" for the part, to be included in SOCs like TI's OMAP.
But PowerVR does not, however, define the exact clocks at which the parts should run, nor other things like number of memory channels, memory speed, etc.
Texas Instruments are the ones who defined the GPU clocks. The OMAP 34xx chips (Droid 1, Milestone, XT720, Flipout, etc) are made using 65nm process, and that determines a certain power consumption using certain clocks, hence why they defined a ~100MHz clock for the GPU and ~600-800MHz for the CPU.
The OMAP 36xx (Droid X, Droid 2, Defy, etc) are made using a newer, smaller 45nm process, which allows them to run at higher speeds while spending approx. the same power, which is why Texas Instruments decided to clock the GPU at ~200MHz and the CPU at ~1-1.2GHz.
So it's not like the Milestones and Droids have their GPUs underclocked, those are just their factory clocks.
Of course, overclocking the GPU would be nice and it could be possible. If someone found out how to change the GPU's voltage and clocks, I'm sure it could come in handy in future games.
However, right now, the 1st gen Milestones/Droids are running every high-end HD game from gameloft at full speed, and I bet it'll even do Infinity Blade and other UE3 games when they're out for Android.
Every "HD" Android game has to be compatible with the 1st-gen Snapdragon's GPU, the Adreno 200, which is a lot slower than the SGX530 @ 100MHz, so we're sitting confortably above the base spec for now. And with all the Windows Mobile 7 phones coming with a 1st-gen Snapdragon (mandatory requirement), it'll be like this for a while.
So there's really not a big need for overclocking the GPU right now, except for getting higher scores in mobile benchmarks (some of them terribly unoptimized, like GLBenchmark 1.1 and 2.0).
Furthermore, I it seems the first factor to limit the 1st-gen Droids in games will be the RAM amount.
The first UE3-based game for Android is already out, and it requires 512MB of RAM.
So the game runs on Nexus One and not on a Droid/Milestone, which has far superior graphics performance.
(I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the fact that Android doesn't allow graphics buffering in the main memory, though, which could be resolved in future firmware revisions).
Then again, overclocking the GPU would be cool, and I'm pretty sure getting our SGX530 to work @ ~200MHz would significantly increase the gaming longevity of our phones for quite a while.

Thanks for your useful and important reply.
"The Manhattan Project" on Galaxy S Series just made me curious about Droid's gpu oc, because SGS also use a PowerVR gpu. But things isn't easy due to a fact that one is made by TI while another is made by samsung, the structure inside both SoCs may be completely different.
But I still hope someone capable would try something on this.
That's really cool and significantly lengthen the lifetime of our Droid and Milestone.
Thx again for your reply!
PS: I also felt strange why the UI(not games) on N1 is faster than an OCed droid, could it be the optimization problem?
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App

TeroZ said:
PS: I also felt strange why the UI(not games) on N1 is faster than an OCed droid, could it be the optimization problem?
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App
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Definitely part of the optimization --a fast ROM with a good theme like the Droid X theme on the GOT 2.2.1 ROM has as fast a GUI as I've encountered on Android, even without overclock.

Also take in consideration that all the current 2.1 and 2.2 roms have a cap of 30fps in 2D, perhaps when the final 2.2 update arrives there will be some perfomance gain
Sent from my Milestone using Tapatalk

[Q] READ! Low FPS in Quadrant? Poor drivers the cause?

Let me start off by saying that I know that all benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, and that Quadrant is a poor and outdated benchmark. But, that does not matter. I'm sure we've all ran at least one Quadrant before. Well, there is an issue with the planets test. The D3 only gets 12fps on it, and there is artifacting throughout the test.
It has been this way for every OMAP based Moto phone. The OG Droid, Droid 2, Droid 2 Global, Droid X, and so on. They ALL run the planets test at 12fps with the same exact artifacts. No matter the GPU or clock speed. I feel like I'm the only one who has noticed this. Go and perform a Quadrant on your D3 and observe the planet test. If you have any other phones, benchmark them too. Compare a D3, D2, and Inc.
The OMAP 4430 has the PowerVR SGX 540 gpu. This was the GPU in the previous gen Hummingbird. On the planets test, it would constantly be at the framerate cap of 56 with no artifacts. The Droid Incredible, even with the pathetic Adreno 200 GPU, would run the planets test well above 30fps. It is not an intense graphics test and nearly any mobile GPU can run it above 30fps.
The only Moto phones that run the planet test without issue are those with the Tegra 2. Keep in mind that Tegra 2 based devices all use nvidia's own proprietary drivers. Sure, the Droid 3 is qHD, and it won't score as well as a Galaxy s or Optimus 3D with the same GPU pushing less pixels. The X2 is also qHD and the Droid 3 typically gets a higher framerate on other GPU benchmarks-except for the planets test. In theory, the Droid 3 should score the same, if not, slightly better, on the planets test.
All of the evidence leads me to believe that it is an issue with Moto's drivers. It isn't TI, since the Optimus 3D has the exact same CPU, but runs the test without a hitch. Is anyone able to provide any insight on this, perhaps someone who can speak with someone at Moto that would know? Will this affect games, or other benchmarks? Can it be fixed in an update? Something is obviously not right here, and I'd like to find out why.
EDIT: I'm on my phone and I was in general when I hit new thread. I don't know how this ended up in development, but I apologize. Will a mod please move this?

Games and emulators on the Droid 3 don't have the FPS problem as compared to other devices. I think it's a coding issue in Quadrant, not a problem in the drivers. It would be like running 3DMark 2000 on today's hardware and having it crash out or run slower than a P3 with a 3DFX card (which it actually does in many cases).

elkay said:
Games and emulators on the Droid 3 don't have the FPS problem as compared to other devices. I think it's a coding issue in Quadrant, not a problem in the drivers. It would be like running 3DMark 2000 on today's hardware and having it crash out or run slower than a P3 with a 3DFX card (which it actually does in many cases).
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A coding issue IS possible, but if it was a coding issue, then how is it that only specific phones from one manufacturer with CPU's and GPU's from the same manufacturers are the only ones with issues? The only Moto phones that don't have the issue are those with the Tegra 2, which uses proprietary coding and drivers from NVIDIA. There are phones from other manufacturers with the same SoC, and very similar hardware otherwise, that don't have the issue. It seems extremely likely that it is an issue with Motorola's software and coding.

GoogleAndroid said:
A coding issue IS possible, but if it was a coding issue, then how is it that only specific phones from one manufacturer with CPU's and GPU's from the same manufacturers are the only ones with issues? The only Moto phones that don't have the issue are those with the Tegra 2, which uses proprietary coding and drivers from NVIDIA. There are phones from other manufacturers with the same SoC, and very similar hardware otherwise, that don't have the issue. It seems extremely likely that it is an issue with Motorola's software and coding.
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I'll respectfully disagree. If the same FPS problem exhibited itself in any games on the market, then I would lean toward agreeing with you. However, I have pretty much every emulator on the market and about 75-80 games on my phone, and not one has shown any performance problems and all outperform my original Droid X by a very noticeable margin.

Or perhaps it's both? Quadrant could use something in OpenGL that isn't supported very well by Motorola's drivers, and it could be a feature that isn't widely used in other apps, so it's why you're not seeing any issues in them.

Pokelover980 said:
Or perhaps it's both? Quadrant could use something in OpenGL that isn't supported very well by Motorola's drivers, and it could be a feature that isn't widely used in other apps, so it's why you're not seeing any issues in them.
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By all means, continue to investigate. I think the problem will end up lying in how Quadrant makes its OGL ES calls. The only one that would help right now is the developer of Quadrant, which if you can get to answer the question, would be great. Not stone hard fact, but a step toward solving this.

Quadrant is not optimised for dual core processors let alone any device that has recently come out in the last year including Tegra devices, the tests are not that complicated in the bench mark yet devices are scoring sub 30 fps values.
Use a different bench mark as Quad is old hat and in need of an update or 3.
-smc

I thought I should note that the PowerVR SGX 540 in our Droid 3's are not the same as the SGX 540 in Samsung's Hummingbird SOC. It's quite a bit faster!
The SGX 540 in the OMAP 4430 is clocked 100MHz higher and gets 4.8GFLOPS vs the Hummingbird's 3.2GFLOPS.

snowblind64 said:
I thought I should note that the PowerVR SGX 540 in our Droid 3's are not the same as the SGX 540 in Samsung's Hummingbird SOC. It's quite a bit faster!
The SGX 540 in the OMAP 4430 is clocked 100MHz higher and gets 4.8GFLOPS vs the Hummingbird's 3.2GFLOPS.
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Yes, but the higher resolution screen counterbalances that.

GoogleAndroid said:
Yes, but the higher resolution screen counterbalances that.
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Well, not quite. The screen resolution only increased by 35% while the GPU is 50% more powerful than the SGX 540 in the Hummingbird SOC. In theory the OMAP4 should still perform better than the Hummingbird even at the higher resolution.
I would have to say that Quadrant is at least partly responsible for the low FPS. It seems likely that Quadrant is using an odd method of method of rendering for the planets test that in combination with Motorola/OMAP drivers causes a massive performance drop. Fortunately this performance issue has not been seen in other apps/games.
My main reason for posting was just to point out that the SGX 540 in our D3's is much faster. I would hate to think our GPU is no better than the Galaxy S'

this is a problem with quadrant, all motorola devices(since the mb200 aka dext/cliq we have this issue, always got the same results in 2d test and the planet) give the same score in the tests. but the new sgx 540 for dual core have a dedicated gpu for 2d graphics, i spent 3 days searching about that. so, the problem is with the app, not the phone.
can somebody send me a benchmark from D3 of smartbench, Mandrobench, linpack, antutu and cfbench. im thinkin in getting one =p

Too many variables in synthetic tests to come to a conclusion with Quadrant. One parameter can be off and that will bias the weighted result. Speaking of weight, the dev still has yet to quantify the weighting in the app for each parameter.
D3 plays N64 and PSX games equal for most and better for some (if already 60fps, will inherently be equal) than the Tegra 2 devices I had or have now. In a way, the D3 is the device the Sony Play should have been (except the control pad is better than the keyboard, of course).

guidoido004 said:
can somebody send me a benchmark from D3 of smartbench, Mandrobench, linpack, antutu and cfbench. im thinkin in getting one =p
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On stock I got ~70mflops on average on multi-threaded Linpack test. With some of the modifications I can do with root, Antutu gets me 5112, and on stock I got somewhere around 4700 I believe. I don't have any of the other benchmarks you listed, so I couldn't tell you for them.

guidoido004 said:
this is a problem with quadrant, all motorola devices(since the mb200 aka dext/cliq we have this issue, always got the same results in 2d test and the planet) give the same score in the tests. but the new sgx 540 for dual core have a dedicated gpu for 2d graphics, i spent 3 days searching about that. so, the problem is with the app, not the phone.
can somebody send me a benchmark from D3 of smartbench, Mandrobench, linpack, antutu and cfbench. im thinkin in getting one =p
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Antutu- 4967
Smartbench 2010-1263, 2849
Smartbench 2011- 3612, 2586
Linpack- 42, 66
CF-Bench-9397, 2636, 5340
Quadrant- 2000-2500
I couldn't find Mandrobench.