Adreno vs Mali | Which one is Better?

Hello everyone, I am going to tell you the difference between Adreno and Mali GPUs, and going to find out which one is better?

First, let’s talk about Mali, 

Pros and cons of Mali:

pros of Mali:

1. Low Price Chipsets for Mali is cheaper than other chipsets, even a smaller company without much investments can use these chipsets, that is why a lot of budget-oriented smartphones comes with Mali GPU.
2. High Clock speed small GPUs have higher clock speed than most of the Adreno GPUs even in the top end. For example, the Most popular snapdragon 625 has an Adreno 506 GPU which has a clock speed of 650 Mhz while in the same segment Mali-T880offers a clock speed of 850 MHz. As a result, the Mali GPU is better suited for rendering graphics.

cons of Mali:

1. Fewer shader coresMali GPUs have fewer shader cores than its competitor. Mali has fewer flops compared to Adreno. Gflops means billion floating operations per second, which is a measure of performance, which is less in Mali. This is why top-end games such as asphalt 8 are failed to play efficiently on Mali GPUs.
2. Limited configuration For example Mali T720 MP2 contains only two cores. Also if we talk about budget smartphones such as Lenovo k8 note, it has Mali-T880 MP4, which has only 4 cores while at the same price you will get Adreno 506 GPU from another brand like Xiaomi, which has a better configuration than the Mali-T880.
3. Overheat Due to high clock frequencies, Mali GPUs are more versatile, which leads to overheating. You can observe overheating issues while processing heavy applications or playing games on your mobile.

Now let’s talk about Adreno:

Adreno is the name of the GPU series developed by Qualcomm for use in their SoCs.Companies like Xiaomi, LG, some phones of Samsung use Adreno GPUs.And even google pixel uses Adreno 540 GPU.

Prons of Adreno: 

1. High Performance: Adreno’s performance is higher than in Mali. Thus, in snapdragon 625, the processing power of Adreno 506 is about 130 GFLOPS, while its rival MTK Helio P10 with GP Mali T860 Mp2 has the processing power of only 47 Gflops.
2.Support for newer API: Adreno has a larger set of API i.e software developer tools and their newer versions than Mali.
3.Less tendency to overheat: Due to lower clock frequencies and multiple processors, Adreno GPUs are more powerful and on average less likely to overheat than Mali.

Cons of an Adreno: 

1. Expensive: Qualcomm manages more than pay for licensing ARM Mali competitors. Therefore, the American company chipsets are more expensive than the same MTK.

2. Worst optimization software: About 20% of all smartphones sold in the world using Mali graphics. As a result, the proportion of Mali on the market is greater and game developers optimize them in the first place.

3. Smaller Fillrate in rendering: In Adreno, texturing is relatively weak. Adreno 530 can render600 million triangles per/sec, while Mali G71 does a much better job by rendering 850 million triangles per/sec. Conclusion: On the side of Adreno, the more powerful computing units, better support for new technologies, the fewer problem with heating. But Mali is taking accessibility, powerful rendering domain, clock frequency, and popularity, thanks to software optimization. In reality, at initial or budget, Mali is preferable but in the solidly middle class and flagship, Adreno takes the lead which is not surprising.