Qualcomm Adreno 509 vs ARM Mali-T760 MP8 vs ARM Mali-T720

Qualcomm Adreno 509

The Qualcomm Adreno 509 is a mobile graphics card for mid-range smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It is included in the lower end Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoCs and based on the Adreno 500 architecture (like the Adreno 520 in the S820, which should be fully compatible in software).

The GPU supports modern standards like Vulkan 1.0 (according to Wikipedia), OpenGL ES 3.1 + AE (3.2 in other sources), OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 12 (FL 12.1 according to Wikipedia, 11.1 according to Qualcomm). Furthermore, the GPU supports Universal Bandwidth Compression (UBWC) to save memory bandwidth.

ARM Mali-T760 MP8

The ARM Mali-T760 MP8 is a fast mobile graphics solution that can be found in ARM SoCs like the Samsung Exynos 7420 Octa (Galaxy S6). The chip is available since Q1/2015 and is one of the fastest solutions of its class at the time of the introduction. Besides OpenGL ES 3.1, the GPU supports OpenCL 1.1 as well as DirectX 11. According to ARM, the Mali-T760 can be scaled from 1 - 16 cores/clusters.

The MP8 version offers 8 clusters clocked at up to 772 MHz (302 GFLOPS). In most benchmarks, the GPU is able to beat the competing Adreno 420 (Snapdragon 805) and PowerVR GX6450 (Apple A8). Only a few tablet chips like Tegra K1/X1 or the GXA6850 (Apple A8X) are still somewhat faster. Overall, the Mali-T760 MP8 is the fastest smartphone GPU in early 2015 and will handle even the most demanding Android games fluently in high resolutions.

Despite its impressive performance, the Mali-T760 MP8 / Exynos 7420 has a very modest power consumption thanks to an advanced 14 nm FinFET process (Samsung LPE). Therefore, it can be used even in smaller smartphones.

ARM Mali-T720

The ARM Mali-T720 is a mobile graphics solution that can be found in ARM SoCs. The chip is available since 2014. Besides OpenGL ES 3.1, the GPU supports OpenCL 1.1 as well as DirectX 11 FL9_3. According to ARM, the Mali-T720 can be scaled from 1 - 8 cores/clusters (MP1, MP2, ... MP) and clocks up to 650 MHz.

Sometimes the SoC does not specifies the number of cores, therefore this generic page / GPU for the single cluster variant is used and the benchmarks may differ. See e.g. the Mali-T720 MP2 and T720 MP4 pages for comparison.

The MP1 variant is only as fast as the older Mali-400 MP4 graphics card and therefore only suited for low demanding 3D games (Android based). However, the power consumption on the other hand is rather low and therefore the GPU is also suited for small smartphones.