Ask HN: How a phone can be more powerfull than a full size laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How a phone can be more powerfull than a full size laptop?

21 pointsguilamu19 comments

As you may have seen, Fortnite will run at 60 fps on the latest Honor View 20 at a resolution of 1080 x 2310 with passive cooling and 0 noise (the game also runs at stable 30 fps+ on last year now 300 usd phones).(1)

Meanwhile, on the latest intel CPU (with integrated so called HD graphics GPU) at a resolution of 1280 x 720, the game performs at between 30 and 50 fps with considerable amount of noise and heat.(2)

So, my question is: how a 600 usd phone (300 usd in a year or so) can outperform by that much a 1,000 usd + laptop? It just beats me...

Are Intel/AMD chips that bad? Are Huawei/Qualcomm chips that good?

1. https://www.soyacincau.com/2019/01/23/honor-view-20-fortnite-60-fps/ 2. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/play-fortnite-intel-hd-graphics

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From my understanding, post processing is completely different, like anti aliasing used, HDR pipeline used, shaders overall used, etc. [1] goes into detail what exactly might differ.

It's not like mobile phone is superior by any means to PC. One can compare TDP and figure out difference in raw performance. Is more that rendering techniques that give "diminishing returns" (in some peoples opinion) are exponentially more resource heavy, for example lightmaps (almost free even on mobiles) vs dynamic shadows (can be insanely expensive).

- [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Platforms/Mobile/Perform...

The game is using lower resolution textures on the phone and probably a lot of stuff turned down beyond the settings available in the desktop version

Edit: The version running on the phone is basically incredibly optimized

The reason it looks so similar is likely the art style. Since it's less realistic, they can (probably) lean heavily on good textures and less on high polycount and fancy graphic techniques (realistic shadows, HDR, etc)

Might be the start of an explanation. It does looks pretty close to me, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xRAlPAhHtI

I took a screenshot from this video.

https://i.imgur.com/z5Tm5zs.jpg -- compare the quality of render marked with blue rectangles. Especially hand.

Indeed a big difference. I would gladly accept this kind of graphics for 60 fps on a low end laptop, too bad it's not an option.

Looks like textures on the Iphone X in that video is at least a quarter of the size, and stuff like grass pops in very close to the character unlike on the PC view

It does indeed. But are lower resolution textures enough to explain the fps/resolution/noise/heat differences between the two devices?

It's the same reason games run better on console than on a desktop with the same specs. It's not only the textures resolution but heavily optimised code for a specific architecture. Here in this case they're probably leveraging graphic instructions on this phone GPU that don't exist on the Intel integrated GPU

PC seems to push at least double the polygons vs iPhone X. Also, on PC trees are animated, shadows are raytraced, and shaders are more complex. But is this PC version on maximum settings? I tried Fortnite on my 2017 Macbook Pro and it runs so hot it actually crashes.

The same reason PlayStation and XBox can provide better graphics than a monster PC, despite having modest specs: When you are targeting a single model of CPU/GPU, you can do all sorts of optimizations.

This is so incorrect it physically hurt to read.

> When you are targeting a single model of CPU/GPU, you can do all sorts of optimizations.

This is in general true, though. Is it not?

I would love to get the details on your comment.

A “monster” pc has raw processing power that consoles are not even close to. Whilst console games are optimised for targeted hardware, optimisation often means a reduction in certain graphical elements to allow the game to run smoothly. You can’t run a console game on the same graphical quality that a monster pc could.

>The same reason PlayStation and XBox can provide better graphics than a monster PC

Yeah, that's not true.

> single model of CPU/GPU

that is also a questionable assumption for Android (?)

They have lots more development dollars thrown at them, basically. And they don't have too much cruft to haul around. Yet.

Development dollars correlate poorly with progress. It helps, but even an order of magnitude difference brings little extra gain.

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