Qualcomm Adreno 540 vs Vivante GC7000UL vs Vivante GC4000

Qualcomm Adreno 540

The Qualcomm Adreno 540 is an integrated graphics card in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC for smartphones. It was introduced in early 2017 and can be found in high-end Android smartphones. 

The integrated GPU is based on the optimized architecture of the Adreno 530, but features clearly improved clock speeds (710 versus 624 MHz according to Anandtech) and better thermal stability. This is also thanks to the new 10 nm process the Snapdragon 835 is produced in. In the reference smartphone from Qualcomm, the Adreno 540 is able to beat or perform at a similar level as the fastest smartphone graphics cards on the market (e.g. the ARM Mali-T880MP12, ARM Mali-G71MP8 or Apple A10 GPU). Therefore, it should be perfectly suited for demanding 3D gaming and also mobile VR and 4K displays.

Vivante GC7000UL

The Vivante GC7000UL is an integrated low end GPU for ARM based smartphones and tablets. It is mostly used for Android based devices and the performance should be similar to the Adreno 305. It is used in the Marvell Technology Group Armada PXA1908 SoC (e.g. in the Samsung Galaxy Xcover 3).

The 3D performance is only suited for low resolution screens. In our review of the Xcover 3 for example Asphalt 8 ran fluently in high detail settings.

Vivante GC4000

The Vivante GC4000 is an integrated graphics card for ARM and MIPS based SoCs. It offers 8 VEC-4 or 32 VEC-1 shader cores. Built using the 40nm LP process at TSMC, Vivante specifies the card  200 M Tir/s geometry rate, 2.5 G Pixels/s texture rate and 45 GFLOPS processing power. It should be 5-8x faster than the GC800 but of course also larger than the GC 800 and GC2000.