Last year, Qualcomm had announced that it would bring updatable GPU drivers to Android smartphones, with help from Google. At the Snapdragon Summit 2019, the company announced updatable GPU drivers for the Snapdragon 765, Snapdragon 855, Snapdragon 855+, and the Snapdragon 865 as a part of Snapdragon Elite Gaming. Now, Google has introduced a new GPU inspector tool for Android smartphones, including the ones from Samsung.
The GPU Inspector is a graphics profiling tool from Google that allows game developers to improve the performance of their games by adding tweaks to the code. These tweaks can then be pushed to smartphones directly through OTA updates via the Play Store. The new tool supports GPUs from both ARM and Qualcomm, and the initial list of supported Samsung phones include the Galaxy Note 10, Galaxy Note 10+, Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, and the Galaxy S10+.
Qualcomm says that new optimizations can push the gaming performance of some games by as much as 40 percent and even improve battery life while gaming. Google and Qualcomm are already collaborating with game studios like Blizzard Entertainment and Gameloft, and the first updates are expected to arrive by the end of this year.
We expect both Exynos and Snapdragon variants of Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy S10 series smartphones to receive these GPU driver updates. Google has also promised to release GPU driver updates to a lot more phones in the coming months. We expect the Galaxy S20 series, Galaxy Fold, and the Galaxy Z Flip to receive OTA GPU driver updates as well.
