PowerVR GX6250 vs Qualcomm Adreno 540

PowerVR GX6250

The PowerVR GX6250 from Imagination Technologies is a mobile graphics card for ARM based SoCs. It is usually used in Android based laptops and smartphones. It was first announced in the MediaTek MT8173 in mid 2014. The performance should be in the higher middle class of mobile GPUs.

The graphics card is part of the series 6XT (Rogue) of GPUs and offers a unified shader architecture with two clusters, two TMUs and 32 FP32-ALUs. The GPU supports OpenGL 3.x/4.x, OpenGL ES 3.x and DirectX 10.

In the MT8173 the GPU is clocked at 700 MHz and therefore the performance should be similar to the Adreno 330. Therefore, even demanding games of 2014 should run fluently.

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.