Qualcomm Adreno 650 vs AMD Radeon RX 5600M vs Qualcomm Adreno 612

Qualcomm Adreno 650

The Qualcomm Adreno 650 is a smartphone and tablet GPU that is integrated within the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 865+ and 870 SoCs. The chip will be available from early 2020 and will be used mainly in high-end Android devices. The base clock speed of the GPU is 250 MHz and the boost depends on the used SoC. For the 865 it is 587 MHz, the 865 Plus increased to 846 MHz and the 2021 870 reached 670 MHz.

According to Qualcomm, the Adreno 650 GPU offers a 25% improved performance over the Adreno 640, its predecessor, which is integrated into the Snapdragon 855 SoC. The enhanced performance is achieved by the Adreno 650 having 50% more compute units (ALUs) than the Adreno 640. Furthermore, the clock speed of the pixel shaders was also increased by 50%.

The performance in our first benchmarks of a reference system positions itself above the ARM Mali-G76 MP16 and e.g. in 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme even on the top spot. In GFXBench only the Apple A13 GPU is able to best the Adreno 650 (regarding smartphone GPUs).

As a novelty, the GPU driver can be updated in the Android Play Store. Furthermore, some features are running under the Elite Gaming brand (e.g., 144 Hz display support, desktop forward rendering). 

The Adreno 650 supports Vulkan 1.1, DirectX 12, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 2.0 FP. Furthermore, games and videos can use HDR10+ and Dolby Vision (with a supported display). The 650 supports 2 displays with up to 4K 60 Hz / QHD+ 144 Hz.

AMD Radeon RX 5600M

The AMD Radeon RX 5600M (or RX 5600 Mobile Graphics) is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 10 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 2,304 cores (36 CUs - compute units) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (12 Gbps most likely). The clock speed of the cores will depend on the laptop according to AMD. It can be up to the desktop RX 5600 XT (1265 base and 1560 boost).

The Navi 10 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the RX5600M should be similar to a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 according to AMD. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) with maximum settings in demanding games. 

The chip starts with a TDP of 60 Watt (for a Max-Q like version we guess, as the RX 5500M already has a TDP of 85 Watt).

Qualcomm Adreno 612

The Qualcomm Adreno 612 is a mobile graphics card for mid-range smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It is included in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 SoCs and based on the Adreno 600 architecture (like the Adreno 630, which should be fully compatible in software).

The performance is similar to the old Adreno 512 graphics card and therefore only in the lower mid-range of modern smartphone SoCs.

The GPU supports modern standards like Vulkan 1.0 (according to Wikipedia), OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 11 (FL 11_1).