We had a chance to see and feel the Adreno 420, Qualcomms latest GPU in action and as you can see from the video, the GPU and the Snapdragon 805 work pretty well.

The GPU is able to render hardware tessellation and can scale a complex terrain and detailed insect from 700 to 230000 polygons, making a real difference in the quality. You don’t need to tessellate in you are far away from an object of interest, but if you get closer, you can crank up the details.

Other demo we saw what the human face, fairly similar to the demo that Nvidia showed with Tegra K1 but our first impression is that Nvidia demo looks more lifelike.

Still Adreno 420 looks and fells fast and healthy and a support for OpenGL ES 3.1 might make a difference. Nvidia has OpenGL 4.4 support making it advantageous over the competition. The chap we talked to at Qualcomm has shared that they believe that Open GL ES is more power efficient and that they can stay in the thermal envelope that is required for phones.

The actual products will be announced later, but Qualcomm has its developer tablets up and running and many customers are testing the Snapdragon 805 silicon as we speak. We expect to see many designs win of it.

Here a video of Adreno 420 and Snapdragon 805 in action.