The Snapdragon 865 chipset is now official, and it comes with a slew of upgrades in key areas. The chipset features ARM’s latest Cortex-A77 cores, delivering a 20% boost in performance from last year, and the Adreno 650 GPU has more cores that result in a massive 25% uptick.
There’s one curious new addition that caught our eye though. Qualcomm will start delivering GPU updates to OEMs, who will then update phones through the Play Store, similar to what NVIDIA and AMD do on PCs. This is a in stark contrast to the old update system, where manufacturers would issue the update via monthly hotfixes, if at all.
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What benefits would updating your GPU more frequently have? Likely, you’d see more patches to rectify issues like game crashes, optimization for performance on new titles, and potentially support for new features. On top of that, we’d probably also see general performance updates keeping devices fast over longer periods of time.
Qualcomm wouldn’t commit to any exact update schedule or planned upgrades to the Adreno 650 on the Snapdragon 865—which for now is the only GPU that will get these updates—but hopefully the company is able to provide such updates to all of its GPUs moving forward.
So, how is this possible, and why now? Well, it currently seems like updating GPU drivers in Play Store is thanks to Google’s Project Mainline in Android 10. Project Mainline allows users to gain security patches and updated Android system components via the Play Store. For now, this is a step in the right direction, and hopefully we’ll see more mid-tier Adreno chipsets get updates like this in the future.
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