Last year, in December, Qualcomm had announced the capability of delivering GPU driver updates via Google Play Store. Last month, the company added support for older chipsets and listed devices from Samsung and Google to be the first to get the feature.
Now it seems that Xiaomi has become the first smartphone manufacturer in China to support this feature. The company has added a GPU Driver Update application on its App Store in China which it claims is for independent updates to improve stability of games such as Crash 3, Peace Elite, Fortnite, and others.
This new method of GPU driver update via Play Store is a welcome move as it’s much easier than the current solution. At this time, the GPU drivers are packaged with system updates and thus it needs carrier approval before releasing.
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Although the new solution requires manufacturers to test the GPU driver updates before releasing them to the Google Play Store for general public, eliminating carrier testing from the process should result in faster deployment.
The initiative of GPU driver updates via Google Play Store was announced as a part of a partnership between Qualcomm and Google for Android GPU Inspector tool for developers that allows to inspect mobile GPU usage (including Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU) in games to figure out where improvements can be made.
Soon after making the announcement of this new update process, Qualcomm clarified that GPU driver updates won’t be a monthly thing like security patches and added that it is “committing to a quarterly cadence for release of updated drivers to the OEM.”
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