Qualcomm Adreno 510 vs Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU

Qualcomm Adreno 510

The Qualcomm Adreno 510 is a mobile graphics card for mid-range smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It is included in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 and 652 SoCs and based on the Adreno 500 architecture (like the Adreno 520 in the S820, which should be fully compatible in software).

The GPU supports modern standards like Vulkan 1.0 (according to Wikipedia), OpenGL ES 3.1 + AE (3.2 in other sources), OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 12 (FL 12.1 according to Wikipedia, 11.1 according to Qualcomm). Furthermore, the GPU supports Universal Bandwidth Compression (UBWC) to save memory bandwidth.

Compared the the faster Adreno 530, the 510 is currently produced in the older 28nm process (650 and 652) and should offer less ALUs. The clock speed is not disclosed.

Early benchmarks and performance ratings from Qualcomm position the GPU on a level with the old Adreno 330 (former high end GPU) in the Snapdragon 810. Therefore, it should be able to handle most Android games up to Full HD fluently.

Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU

The Apple M2 Max 38-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 38 cores in the M2 Max Chip.

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 512 bit bus (up to 400 GBit/s).

Thanks to the additional cores and architectural improvements, the M2 Max GPU should clearly best the old M1 Max GPU with 32 cores and therefore be the fastest iGPU currently available.

The GPU is intended to use Apple Metal 2 API and could still be based on the older PowerVR architectures (last used in the Apple A10). A new feature in the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 of 2023 is the support for HDMI 2.1 and 8k output.

The Apple M2 Max is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC. According to the internal powermetrics tool, the GPU uses up to 53.6 Watt (performance mode) and the whole chip (including the CPU) up to 89 Watt.