The Moto X's gaming (and real life) performance

[Beplexor]

I'm very interested in the potential gaming performances of the upcoming Motorola X (as well as the other Droid lineup), in light of the fact many people are less than excited for their releases due to their non cutting-edge specs.

The Droid MAXX, Droid Ultra and Droid Mini are all confirmed to be equipped with Motorola's new X8 Mobile Computing System, and the Moto X is almost guaranteed to come with it as well.

The X8 consists of 8 cores, and they are categorized as:

- 2 application processor cores
- 4 graphics processor cores
- 1 contextual computing processor core
- 1 natural processor core

The overall X8 MCS is exciting for a variety of reasons, with the main one being that because of the highly custom and optimized system, the battery will enjoy a heavily increased lifespan. The gaming capabilities, however, are of course the main focus of this thread.

This is what Motorola has to say about the graphics processor cores:

"Four powerful graphics processors each running at 400 MHz delivering 3.2 million pixel fill rate,16 shader units, 512kb dedicated cached memory and running the Egypt performance benchmark at a blazing 155 frames per second (FPS). Fully compliant with Android Project Butter."

Being (apparently) based off the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, the X8 comes with an Adreno 320 GPU.

For a comparison, here are the results of other comparable devices tackling the Egypt GLBenchmark 2.5:

Galaxy S4 - 40 FPS; HTC One - 32 FPS; Optimus G Pro - 27 FPS; Nexus 4 - 44 FPS.

Just ignore the 1080p and 720p aspects here. True, the Nexus 4 cruises through thanks to its 720p display requiring less work. However, this only serves to enhance the X8's power; while it has an Adreno 320 just like all the devices listed above except for the S4, it completely blows them out of the water - the Moto X is just like the Nexus 4, with a 4.7 inch screen and a 720p display. I know we're talking on a synthetic level here and that real world performance can differ, but surely this is too big a difference to brush aside like that?

What do you guys think? Is there really more to the Moto X and and new Droid lineup than meets the eye, for those who look at it purely from a specs perspective?

For all the information, this is the link I used: Motorola

 

[Cronis]

its all speculation till we have the phones in hand and tested.

I think people get all awed by the quad core CPUs when we should be focusing more on hardware/software optimization then tech upgrade races. perhaps google/moto realized this with the most recent droid releases. Also a dual core CPU presumably reduces the overall TDP requirements of the chipset (longer potential battery life) giving longer uses between charging.

also is this whole x8 thing just hyperthreading? or are they physical cores?

As i said though this is all speculation till we can get some real reviews/benchmarks in.

 

[BlueIce5249]

Like Cronis said, all speculation. It seems as if Motorola is going for the casual customer though with the Moto X.

Which sadly I have fallen into I think . Once upon a time I wanted the best and greatest out there. Now I'm happy with a cool phone that gets the job done. (Damn you real life! I avoided you for so long!)

 

[EarlyMon]

They're physical cores and the numbers are not uncommon.

Dual core processors since 2011 have had 6 cores or more.

The main processor is called an SoC - system on (a) chip.

Rather than one or two cores per chip and a bunch of chips all wired together on a motherboard, like on most PCs, it's all reduced to a single chip.

 

[Red Devil]

I wonder why Qualcomm opted to help Motorola produce its own SoC instead of selling their own chips to Motorola for the X phone. Surely selling the Snapdragon 800\600\Pro would be more profitable

The natural language processor core is quite interesting. I wonder if they are planning to have direct speech translation from one language to another. That would be quite something

 

[EarlyMon]

I wonder why Qualcomm opted to help Motorola produce its own SoC instead of selling their own chips to Motorola for the X phone. Surely selling the Snapdragon 800\600\Pro would be more profitable

The natural language processor core is quite interesting. I wonder if they are planning to have direct speech translation from one language to another. That would be quite something

The natural language core may simply be one of the existing Hexagon digital signal processing cores in the S4 Pro programmed to the task.

There's another popular trick in the industry where instead of one chip inside of one package (the black things you see looking at a motherboard) as per usual, you place more than one chip in the package. That's called an MCM - multi chip module. and it's a big cost saver.

Ram and eMMC flash storage, at least two chips, typically show up in phones as an MCM.

The Snapdragon S4 family is profitable to produce, they've had a lot of practice gets yields up, rejects down.

Whether this X8 will use a built-in Hexagon DSP or add chips in an MCM configuration is unknown at this point, but both could give processing power with economy.

The Snapdragon 800 wasn't in Motorola's best interests, they weren't sampling it when the phone was being designed if we trust earlier reports.

The Snapdragon S4 Pro contains a programmable world modem on board. The Snapdragon 600 requires a separate chip and package for it, raising costs and not helping power draw.

Qualcomm makes none of these chips, everything is contracted out, iow, they're a fabless manufacturer.

They've already contracted to have Samsung produce Snapdragon S4 processors in Texas.

They could easily do the same with this chip - there's a phenomenal amount of unused manufacturing facilities in Texas.

There are a lot of possibilities and hidden stories that the blogosphere has been absolutely clueless in uncovering here.

Except Anandtech.com - credit Brian Klug there for a bit of this.

 

[EarlyMon]

If you believe synthetic benchmarks, gaming on this should be outstanding.

Benchmarks at - http://androidforums.com/motorola-m...rola-x-pre-release-thread-25.html#post6032856

 

[Sandroidfan]

GSMarena posted their benchmark results as well. It doesn't lead the pack in CPU tests but it seems to perform quite admirably in graphics tests.

Motorola Moto X hands-on: First look - GSMArena.com

 

[MarvinAndroid]

Like Cronis said, all speculation. It seems as if Motorola is going for the casual customer though with the Moto X.

Which sadly I have fallen into I think . Once upon a time I wanted the best and greatest out there. Now I'm happy with a cool phone that gets the job done. (Damn you real life! I avoided you for so long!)

You know, this is kind of how I'm feeling lately too. I'm feeling less of that need to have the absolutely blazingly fastest device than to just have one which works very smoothly and very well. I do play games on my phones, but it's not the main function. As long as it can play the latest stuff without an issue and last me two years without bogging down.. then I'm fine. In the end I just want a solid phone. The actual specs are starting to matter less and less to me.

The same thing is happening in the gaming console space I think. The devices are getting to the point where they are powerful enough so the difference between the two is not as apparent to the naked eye. It comes down to more what kind of software and features you have available. Back in the 16-bit and 32-bit days though... you'd argue those specs out for days... and it actually did make a visible difference in games as well (SNES games had lots of colors and great sound... but they slowed down often and badly - Genesis games tended to be super fast and smooth... but with fewer colors you got that grainy shading kind of look with no true transparencies - that kind of thing).

More and more, I have a feeling this Moto X is the thing for me. Can't wait to see some reviews come in.

 

[EarlyMon]

 

[mistermojorizi]

This is what Motorola has to say about the graphics processor cores:

"Four powerful graphics processors each running at 400 MHz delivering 3.2 million pixel fill rate,16 shader units, 512kb dedicated cached memory and running the Egypt performance benchmark at a blazing 155 frames per second (FPS). Fully compliant with Android Project Butter."

Being (apparently) based off the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, the X8 comes with an Adreno 320 GPU.

For a comparison, here are the results of other comparable devices tackling the Egypt GLBenchmark 2.5:

Galaxy S4 - 40 FPS; HTC One - 32 FPS; Optimus G Pro - 27 FPS; Nexus 4 - 44 FPS.

was really excited about this. 155 fps would be amazing. However, it's actually most likely a typo. The X has been benchmarked at about 55fps in that test. I don't think that Motorola was trying to be misleading on purpose, just stupid for adding a 1 (at least they didn't add a zero and make it 550fps, lol).

still a fine number, but not in the same ball park as what they claimed.