ARM Mali-G72 MP18 vs AMD Radeon R5 (Bristol Ridge)

ARM Mali-G72 MP18

The ARM Mali-G72 MP18 is an integrated high-end graphics card for ARM based SoCs (mostly Android based). It was introduced in early 2018 in the Exynos 9810 (e.g. Galaxy S9). It integrates 18 of the 32 possible cores and is based on the second generation of the Bifrost architecture. According to ARM it offers improvements in the machine learning efficiency and a bigger tile buffer for 16x anti-aliasing.

In our benchmarks it slightly below a Adreno 540 and is therefore suitable for demanding mobile games.

The GPU supports all modern graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, OpenCL 2.0, DirectX 12 FL11_1 and Renderscript.

AMD Radeon R5 (Bristol Ridge)

The AMD Radeon R5 (Bristol Ridge) is an integrated graphics card for a number of mid-range mobile Bristol-Ridge-based APUs, such as those from the A10 series. It features 384 shader cores clocked at 720 MHz (15 Watt APUs) or 800 MHz (35 Watt APUs). Depending on the configurable TDP (set per laptop model) and the used main memory, the performance can also differ.

Architecture and Features

The Radeon R5 utilizes the third generation GCN architecture (sometimes referred to as GCN 1.2) similar to the desktop Tonga chip. As a result, it supports DirectX 12 (FL 12_0) with advanced color compression that leads to a 5-7% improvement in games. Furthermore, its shaders can be used with Mantle, OpenGL and OpenCL. HSA 1.0 is supported for running code on both CPU and GPU cores simultaneously. The improved video decoder UVD 6 (Unified Video Decoder) is now able to decode HVEC / H.265 up to 4K in hardware. Furthermore, the VCE (Video Codec Engine) has been improved for faster transcoding of H.264. More information on architecture and features of the Bristol Ridge architecture can be found in our launch article.

Performance

Gaming performance of the integrated R5 GPU depends on the configured TDP, model and main memory of the system. A typical ULV version with a TDP of 15 Watt paired with fast dual channel main memory is nearly on a level with the dedicated GeForce 920M or Radeon R7 M260 (see gaming benchmarks below). Therefore, demanding games of 2015 and 2016 may only run in the lowest detail settings fluently (and some not at all).

Power Consumption

Depending on the configured TDP, the still in 28 nm produced chip may be used in thin-and-light (12 - 20 Watt range) to standard-sized laptops (35 Watt TDP).