A developer for TapTapTap benchmarked some OpenGL code on the new iPhone 3GS and compared the results to the older iPod Touch 2G with impressive results. You may wonder why he didn’t compare it against a regular iPhone 3G or original iPhone, but it’s been previously proven that the iPod Touch has a faster processor than the iPhone.
Anyway, his test used a simple OpenGL|ES v1.1 application, so it wasn’t using the new OpenGL|ES 2 features, but the results still showed the 3GS was approximately twice as fast. Then, to compare the impact of the faster processor alone, he ran the standard Scimark2 benchmark suite.
I ran the test on the Touch and the 3gs with both small and large (cache-blowing) datasets to see how they compared. Here are the results:
iPhone 3Gs: 6.42 Mflops (small dataset) 5.86 Mflops (large dataset)
2g Touch: 5.21 Mflops (small dataset) 4.86 Mflops (large dataset)
In these tests the 3G S comes out about 20% faster than the 2g Touch. Given that the clock speed of the 3G S is only about 12% faster, there is definitely some extra oomph coming from the upgraded processor architecture, but I think it’s pretty clear that the PowerVR SGX’s contribution to our performance increase is substantial.
