There's really no question. The Adreno 220 in the Evo 3D utterly destroyed everything that was out (including/especially the tegra 2).
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4243/36161.png
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4243/36162.png
(Other smartphones incl. SGSII from same site with same tests, so numbers should carry over):
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4177/35412.png
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4177/35413.png
The graphics capabilities of the Adreno 220 inside the Evo 3D are beyond belief. It makes the iPhone look like a joke -- now if only devs would release games like Infinity Blade and such for Android. This is currently the most graphically advanced chipset on a mobile device on the planet.
Now imagine this baby overclocked to 2+Ghz now that the bootloaders are unlocked (recall that the Adreno clock scales with CPU clock).
For an example game, check this out:
YouTube - ‪Snapdragon's Adreno GPU - Desert Winds Game Demo‬‏
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When it comes to the MPCore, Qualcomm did their own thing and make Scorpion. It has many similarities to Cortex A8, to include NEON support, but also has some nice benefits, such as multi-core support and a 128-bit SIMD instruction set. In real world performance today, with the A8 as baseline, a Scorpion will outperform the A8 by about 5% at the same clock speeds, and an A9 will beat the A8 by about 20% at the same clock speeds. Nonsense. The a9 is rarely 20% faster. Even 15% is more in line with actual threaded benchmarks. I'll address the "5%" nonsense below.
"Raw processing power - Snapdragon 1.2ghz > OMAP4/Exynos 1ghz > Tegra 2 1ghz (but all in the same neighborhood)."
-- This much is true, of course.
Graphics - Exynos > Tegra 2 > OMAP 4 > Snapdragon (the big jump being OMAP4 to Tegra 2)
-- This is nonsense of the first order, born of placebo, bad past implementations, and pure folly. Look at the benchmarks (particularly the real rendering ones like GLBenchmark 2 Egypt/Pro with screen size accounted for). A more accurate and non-biased ranking would be:
Adreno 220 > SGX543 (A5) >
Tegra 2 >= MALI400 >= Adreno 205 (Play) > SGX530 > Adreno 200.
"Potential Battery Life - Tegra 2 > Exynos/OMAP4 > Snapdragon (dependent on MANY other factors of the handset)"
What utterly, grotesquely absurd drivel born of bigoted, unscientific bias. When tested on devices of comparable resolutions and near-identical kernel build (and truly identical stock 2.2.1 Android build save for the drivers), screen turned off and all radios turned on, the differences between, for instance, the QSD8250 and the SGS a8 hummingbird are laughably apparent. The A8 draws almost 50% more power at 1.4Ghz+.
The dual-core 45nm gen 3 MSM8660 snapdragon with independent clock units and newer enhanced Scorpion MPCore draws lower sustained power across the board, even heavily overclocked (or simply at 1.5Ghz like they were designed for). In terms of handset differences, yes, HTC's snapdragon devices are only "barely on par" with the others because of many things, not just the battery size (which has tended to be a bit smaller). Sense 2 is very resource-hungry and the build (not to mention the various Sense widgets, additional Sense I/O, sense radio usage, etc) draw power like no other. It also is among the most graphically intensive overlays (due to the actual graphical output or to poor coding is debatable, of course).
"There is no clear winner. If you're a 3D gamer, ONLY get Tegra 2 or Exynos." And of course a conclusion drawn from nonsense is nonsense, like this one. Even for a gamer, they will all do well, and currently the Adreno 220 on the MSM8660 (in the Evo 3D and Sensation) is leading the pack by a very solid margin. By design, that is. Implementation-side optimization is always better left to the community, of course.
What people don't seem to realize is that beyond just a 'die-shrink', despite retaining the name, the third-gen Scorpion 45nm is now well over "5%" faster per-clock than the stock A8. Although the architecture is very similar, there have been remarkable improvements. As Qualcomm themselves presented on March 11 during their MPCore overview in Korea, the MSM8x60 is a huge amount over "5%" faster per clock, and a huge amount more power efficient than even the A9, not the least of which is due to the independent core clock scaling. As for the "console quality graphics" myth, no mobile chipset is there yet. During the same presentation (and now on their website), Qualcomm also admitted the Adreno 220 isn't the "console level" GPU they talked about at all -- that's the 3XX series with the 8X70 ("NEXT GEN", which is also reportedly 47% more power efficient than the A15 with 23% more performance headroom).
The MSM8660 (the one in the Evo 3D) has, in addition to its 128-bit FPU (with 1.5-6x performance of the 64-bit in the A9), an enhanced OOO unit, 8 outstanding non-cacheable loads in L1 cache (versus only 1 in the a9, meaning significantly better multimedia processing), and a tightly coupled 512kb L2 with much lower memory latency and better CPU snappiness/efficiency as opposed to A9's embarrassingly loose-coupled L2. "5%" better is the biggest load of bull I've heard since the 65nm scorpion was tested under a suboptimal arm linux build on lkml for a preliminary benchmark vs the already-optimized stock A8. Its dual core "real world performance" of the chipset in total at 1.2Ghz is roughly 30% better than the reference dual A9 with comparable governor and identically configured kernel (and distro/android build). The 2.6.32 stock kernel is now much better optimized for the 45nm chips and actually takes advantage of the additional FPU and larger NEON superset when compiled properly. Since then the last-gen 8x55 at 1.4Ghz has proven comparable to a
dual core stock a9 at 1ghz, and with a similar power profile to boot. As clock speeds get higher, scorpion has an even greater power advantage. At 1.2Ghz, the snapdragon is quite a bit more power efficient than the 1.2Ghz a9, for instance, and beyond that the difference can breach 75%.
The Adreno 220 GPU is over double the performance of the Adreno 205, which itself was nearly on par or better than the likes of the first gen hummingbird's GPU (SGS 1's SGX) in almost all of the modern GL2.0 benchmarks (and well over double the performance of the Adreno 200).
Take the glorified pro-Samsung/Tegra nonsense you hear with a grain (or bucket) of salt. Just because people are stigmatized against Qualcomm due to HTC's legacy of providing underclocked devices with older graphics drivers (SE is the only company who bothered to ship their device, the Play, with updated Adreno 205 drivers, by the way), doesn't take away anything from the fact that even the Adreno 205 can essentially hold its own against even the Tegra 2. The 220 is double the real-world performance of that.
