Here are the devices that will receive GPU driver updates from Qualcomm via Google Play Store

Alongside the Snapdragon 865 and a few other smartphone chips, Qualcomm also announced that it will update GPU drivers through the Google Play Store. At the Google for Games Developer summit yesterday, Qualcomm listed out the first few smartphones that will receive these updates. But what do these updates bring?

Smartphone GPUs have traditionally been quite locked down, unlike its PC components that receive regular updates with optimisations in place to run various games smoothly without taking up too much power. Similarly, Google announced the Android GPU Inspector which makes building and optimising games on the Android platform much easier.

The Inspector tool offers detailed insights into how the game is rendered and the GPU counter that was previously not available for developers. This information can be used to improve frame rates and lower power usage to improve battery life in smartphones.

To drive the point home, Google said it worked with an unnamed game developer to see how the GPU Inspector helps. It used a Pixel 4 XL powered by the Snapdragon 855 to discover a way to save 40% utilisation in GPU.

Using the Inspector tool, developers can also suggest changes they want to see at the chip-level for Qualcomm to incorporate in its Adreno family of GPUs via driver updates. Qualcomm makes these updates available to developers first to allow for faster testing of these optimisations.

These improvements will be compiled and released as driver updates via the Google Play Store. You can expect performance and feature upgrades from them and the user experience, especially while gaming should see an improvement in devices that do tend to drop a few frames or consume too much power.

For now, only the Google Pixel 4 series, the Galaxy S10 series and the Galaxy Note 10 series (Qualcomm powered) will be supported with GPU driver updates via the Google Play Store with more devices to be added to the roster sometime later.

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