iPad 4th gen: How does PowerVR 554MP4 compare to X360/PS3 GPUs?

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-Sweeper_

Newcomer
So, Apple just launched the new new iPad. The A6X SoC brings twice the performance of iPad 3th gen's 543MP4 and packs 32 SIMDs for 76.8 GFLOPS at 300MHz (128-bit interface). It also has two of Apple's new Swift cores running at up to 1.4GHz on the CPU side of things and 1GB RAM.

More here: www.anandtech.com/show/6426/ipad-4-gpu-performance-analyzed-powervr-sgx-554mp4-under-the-hood

With that said, how does this new device compare to our 6/7 year old consoles? Are tablets/cellphones already capable of matching their graphics or we'll have to wait 1+ generation(s) until that?
 
Tile based deferred rendering is pretty dominate in the mobile space because of efficiency correct? I don't know how that architecture compares to traditional desktop GPUs or how its feature sets differ. There is probably more to it than just comparing raw FP.

I have looked at some of the "best" games on phone/tablet based platforms and I have yet to see anything that looks anywhere as good as current gen console graphics (but that could be due to budget).

It will probably be in the realm of apples vs oranges (I have seen this discussion many times without anything concrete) unless somone could benchmark both on equal platforms and software.
 
-Sweeper_ said:
Wrong forum section. Admins, please move the thread.
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I'd rather ask what do we need a relevant thread for EVERY TIME Apple releases a new small form factor SoC. Is anyone going to play today's console games on an iPad or are some just worried that a tablet might equal or surpass current generation hw? If it's the latter it'll be around next year, just about the time where the scenario will be how the iPad5 GPU will compare to the XBox360 GPU.
 
Ailuros said:
I'd rather ask what do we need a relevant thread for EVERY TIME Apple releases a new small form factor SoC. Is anyone going to play today's console games on an iPad or are some just worried that a tablet might equal or surpass current generation hw? If it's the latter it'll be around next year, just about the time where the scenario will be how the iPad5 GPU will compare to the XBox360 GPU.
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You really think so?
 
Pressure said:
Considering PowerVR Series 6 aka 'Rogue' should scale all the way up to 1 TFLOP/s, it should be quite easy to match and surpass current consoles.
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Rogue's ability to scale that high and that flavor being included in a tablet are two different things.
 
yes & no
yes there are things the ipad4 is faster than both the cosoles in (from experience) but on the other side no its slower in other things
 
LXFBN said:
You really think so?
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Yes I am as "bold" to think that a ST Novathor A9600 with over 210GFLOPs and over 13 GTexels/s effective fillrate in a small form factor power envelope will be on paper on par with the Xenos GPU and in real time quite a bit more efficient while at the same time being DX11.1 against DX9.0.

3dcgi said:
Rogue's ability to scale that high and that flavor being included in a tablet are two different things.
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See above. And I'll elaborate a wee bit further. It seems that AMD's Hondo yields for the same amount of SPs and comparable frequencies (always under comparable manufacturing processes) about the same performance with the current Series5XT GPU IP generation. Hondo is several generations ahead of the C1 and so is Rogue compared to Series5 especially if you consider that the generational cadence for small form factor is typically at least 5 years long. Further to that a 80SPs@< 300MHz Radeon SoC block doesn't seem to surpass a PS Vita quad core GPU block at 200MHz either in DX9 applications, so the question rather is where the pessimism exactly comes from that a small form factor design could NOT break even or surpass an 8 year old GPU console design.

On an unrelated note I severely doubt that 1 TFLOP is the maximum latency of Series6 designs.
 
I think overall the iPad 3 isn't even a fifth of the 360 taking in all factors including bandwidth efficiency? So the iPad 4 is two-fifths at most. ;) And so we'll need two more steps like that to pass 360, though of course that still means graphics will need to be heavily upscaled considering the high native res the iPad has vs the 360.

So yes, I also agree that tablets may eventually, and not too far from now, match up, and that it is quite likely we'll have the first next-gen consoles on the market by the time that happens.
 
is the PowerVR 554MP4 even comparable to the intel HD 4000? Last time I check, the HD 4000 is choking running skyrim at low setting.
 
Ailuros said:
Further to that a 80SPs@< 300MHz Radeon SoC block doesn't seem to surpass a PS Vita quad core GPU block at 200MHz either in DX9 application (...)
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I don't recall ever seeing a "Radeon SoC" (as in, "SoC" means there would be integrated peripherals and peripheral ports). AMD's current plans seem to point at developing ARM SoCs with Radeon GPUs, but I really doubt these will be based off the same ~3 year-old VLIW5 Cedar chip.

I think the very first AMD/ARM SoCs should be pointing their GPU guns at the whatever best that IMG can offer by then.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
I don't recall ever seeing a "Radeon SoC" (as in, "SoC" means there would be integrated peripherals and peripheral ports). AMD's current plans seem to point at developing ARM SoCs with Radeon GPUs, but I really doubt these will be based off the same ~3 year-old VLIW5 Cedar chip.
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I was pointing at AMD Hondo with is if Anand quoted GLBenchmark2.5 from it correctly about 40+% behind the iPad4 GPU block.

I think the very first AMD/ARM SoCs should be pointing their GPU guns at the whatever best that IMG can offer by then.
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We of course have quite some time until then.

Gitaroo said:
is the PowerVR 554MP4 even comparable to the intel HD 4000? Last time I check, the HD 4000 is choking running skyrim at low setting.
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They'd be all choking over something as demanding unless someone would bother to code a severely trimmed down version for mobile of Skyrim. You have to remember that tablets typically are in the <10W TDP power envelope, which usually leaves only less of a handfull of Watts for the GPU for 3D.
 
Ailuros said:
It seems that AMD's Hondo yields for the same amount of SPs and comparable frequencies (always under comparable manufacturing processes) about the same performance with the current Series5XT GPU IP generation. Hondo is several generations ahead of the C1 and so is Rogue compared to Series5 especially if you consider that the generational cadence for small form factor is typically at least 5 years long. Further to that a 80SPs@< 300MHz Radeon SoC block doesn't seem to surpass a PS Vita quad core GPU block at 200MHz either in DX9 applications, so the question rather is where the pessimism exactly comes from that a small form factor design could NOT break even or surpass an 8 year old GPU console design.
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I don't understand the comparison to Hondo which is far slower than Xenos and the Xbox 360.
 
3dcgi said:
I don't understand the comparison to Hondo which is far slower than Xenos and the Xbox 360.
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Well then you obviously wouldn't understand the attempt to compare C1/Xenos and the 554MP4 either.
 
Ailuros said:
will be on paper on par with the Xenos GPU and in real time quite a bit more efficient while at the same time being DX11.1 against DX9.0.
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I personally rank Xbox 360 GPU feature set somewhere between DX10.1 and DX11. Xbox has unified shaders (just like all DX10 hardware) and memexport is more flexible than DX10 stream out. Unlike all DX9 hardware, Xbox has very good vertex shader texture fetch support (all formats supported) and it has programmable vertex fetch as well (DX10 doesn't). Xbox 360 also supports constant buffers, state blocks and command buffers (all new DX10 features) and you can overlap GPU resources in memory (pretty much providing all the same features as resource views do in DX10 + a bit more flexibility). Xbox lacks DX10 geometry shaders, but you can do most of the same stuff (+ a lot more) with programmable vertex fetch, tessellator and XPS (ability to put CPU callbacks to GPU ring buffer and feed data directly from CPU L2 cache to GPU).

Efficiency is of course harder to estimate. Many efficiency improving features in recent GPUs (and mobile GPUs) tackle backbuffer bandwidth. Xbox has very fast backbuffer bandwidth because of EDRAM. The "unlimited" bandwidth makes blending and MSAA free and reduces cost of overdraw. Basically Xbox doesn't need backbuffer efficiency improving features (such as TBDR and color/depth compression). GPUs that have limited backbuffer bandwidth need these features much more.

DX11 brings compute shaders, and those can be used to drastically improve performance of some rendering algorithms. Xbox 360 memexport / XPS / programmable vfetch cannot compete against that.
 
Ailuros said:
Well then you obviously wouldn't understand the attempt to compare C1/Xenos and the 554MP4 either.
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I didn't insult you so there's no reason to insult me. I'm not questioning the Xbox/iPad comparison only how saying iPad 4 is faster than Hondo somehow means it or the next chip will be faster than Xenos. I have no doubt IMG can design something faster than Xenos the question is how does a shipping product compare and when will future shipping products compare.
 
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