Monday, October 30th 2023
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Put Through Graphics Tests, Beats AMD Radeon 780M iGPU in 3DMark
Qualcomm Snapdragon X is out to change the thin-and-light notebook market, and is out to eat the lunches of U-segment and possibly P-segment processors from Intel and AMD. The Arm based processor promises to be a competitor to Apple's M2 and M2 Max SoCs powering the latest generation of Macbooks, so Windows 11 and Chrome OS-based thin-and-lights could offer similar levels of performance and battery life. Geekerwan put the Adreno iGPU of the Snapdragon X Elite through a couple of benchmarks to show how they compare to the iGPUs of contemporary 15 W to 28 W class SoCs across Arm and x64 machine architectures, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU.
In the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark, designed for graphics solutions of this class, the Snapdragon X Elite scored 39.2 FPS (average), compared to 60 FPS of the Apple M2 Max, 40 FPS of the Apple M2. The Core i7-13700H "Raptor Lake" is a 45 W mobile processor with an Intel Xe-LP based iGPU that has 96 EU. This chip scored just 22.5 FPS in this test. The surprise here is the Radeon 780M, the iGPU of the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, based on the latest RDNA3 architecture, with 12 compute units (768 stream processors). This chip did just 28 FPS, falling behind even the M2. The other benchmark is "Control" at 1080p with its lowest graphics settings, and here the results are fundamentally different. With "Control," we see the Snapdragon X Elite post a respectable 53 FPS, which is almost as fast as the 56 FPS by the Radeon 780M powering the Ryzen 7 7740HS, but ahead of the 43 FPS put by the Apple M2, and a whopping 145 FPS by the M2 Max.
Sources:
Geekerwan (YouTube), HXL (Twitter), VideoCardz
In the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark, designed for graphics solutions of this class, the Snapdragon X Elite scored 39.2 FPS (average), compared to 60 FPS of the Apple M2 Max, 40 FPS of the Apple M2. The Core i7-13700H "Raptor Lake" is a 45 W mobile processor with an Intel Xe-LP based iGPU that has 96 EU. This chip scored just 22.5 FPS in this test. The surprise here is the Radeon 780M, the iGPU of the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, based on the latest RDNA3 architecture, with 12 compute units (768 stream processors). This chip did just 28 FPS, falling behind even the M2. The other benchmark is "Control" at 1080p with its lowest graphics settings, and here the results are fundamentally different. With "Control," we see the Snapdragon X Elite post a respectable 53 FPS, which is almost as fast as the 56 FPS by the Radeon 780M powering the Ryzen 7 7740HS, but ahead of the 43 FPS put by the Apple M2, and a whopping 145 FPS by the M2 Max.
40 Comments on Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Put Through Graphics Tests, Beats AMD Radeon 780M iGPU in 3DMark
Looks promising.
For real though seeing their 96EU iGPU get absolutely housed by Qualcomm's first stab at a desktop part is poetry
www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-performance-preview-a-first-look-at-whats-to-come
So long as users value using software made before <current year> such performance will be key to widespread ARM adoption. Box86/64 shows a lot of promise, but they're like steam for linux in 2013,a neat idea but far from mature.Apple has vertical integration on their side.
For windows, at least for now, he's right. ARM devices are nothing more then curiosities that sell to a niche of a niche. Widespread adoption requires the use of translation software, which MS has been VERY slow to improve.
If they did support it, I'd have a macbook pro, because nothing in the PC space remotely the size of a macbook can match its performance AND battery life at the same time.
For all their failures the macbooks are really impressive. Able to maintain full performance when plugged in or push 19 hours of youtube streaming on a single charge. That's just impressive.
dGPUs cannot factor in here, because while they offer superior performance their efficiency is horrific by comparison. Even downclocked dGPU systems are not known for battery life.
Also, iirc someone was able to run rosetta2 on amazon servers running linux, 3 hiccups happened, one was kernel (some kernel 4kb or 16kb stuff), some memory ordering stuff that is different between arm/x86 (apple follows intel memory when running a rosetta app), and iirc it required a binary taken from an ARM-based mac.
The last one can be reverse engineered/remade in software, the first 2 require hardware level stuff (and thus require to be emulated on un-supported hardware). And not every application required the issues to be solved. This is all for near-native speeds, if you dont care about near-native then yea all can be done in software.