I wonder how far or how good Mali is now compared to others. I wish Chip and Cheese do compassion on GPU as well.
Unless it is a Pixel or Samsung Sxy flagship device, chances are the driver, which will never get updated, it a box full of interesting developer moments.
Just go to chrome://gpu to check the amount of workarounds enabled in Chrome alone.
It's depressing how bad the drivers are. They have 0 market pressure to improve the quality, unlike PC where the whiniest group on the internet (gamers on reddit) will crucify you for driver problems. I've spent too much time investigating and implementing workarounds. Though it does pay my bills...
thank you, will be using this, it’s far more accurate than simply throwing the devs under the bus and ignoring all the unspoken context of said moments, while not papering over the… interesting developer moments.
Example benchmark showing how extremely far Google is behind:
GeekBench 6 Compute Score (GPU):
Xring O3. 36901. (the GPU in this announcement)
Snapdragon 8 Elite G5 27501. (Adreno 840)
Dimensity 9500M. 23753. (Mali-G1 Ultra MP11).
Tensor G6. 6216. (PowerVR CXTP-48-1536)I thought these GPU were open source with mainline kernel support?
If true, why aren't they marketing it to datacenters?
I guess that's nice and makes sense on mobile, but it somehow feels a bit disappointing that realtime 3D is shifting from modeling to slop filters.
This is another story with DLSS 5, which doesn't reconstruct some ground truth and which is a pure post-processing effect. It just makes the final image look more photo-like in a vague sense. This is more of a "slop filter".
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2026/09/07/arms-2026-tech-day-i...
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arms-c2-ultra-g2-ultra-nx-and-c...
* Neural Super Sampling (NSS) reconstructs higher-resolution images from lower-resolution renders, reducing the amount of conventional rendering work needed to produce a high-quality final image.
* Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) generates intermediate frames to increase frame rates and deliver smoother gameplay.
* Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) combines neural upscaling with denoising to improve image quality in demanding ray-traced scenes with complex lighting and shadows.
And nor is reconstructs true.
To see a representative stream of papers, go to arxiv and look through the recent graphics papers.
I and most of my peers have been playing home computers, since the 8 bit days, eventually moved into PC gaming with a 386SX in 1991.
While I owned a few consoles, the PC remained the main gaming platform.
Do agree that younger generations are mostly playing mobile games.
Other Samsung devices aren't so lucky.
PC drivers are equally as bad when using laptops by the way.
While you can try to use the plain drivers from Intel, AMD and NVidia, usually the ones in the laptops have custom changes made by the OEM for the laptop motherboard design, and you can get into issues like thermal handling, when not using the drivers provided by the OEM update services.
Thus there is a considerable lag for the support of newer Mali generations.
Some Linux distributions for various embedded computers with Arm-based CPUs and GPUs use closed-source GPU drivers from Arm, not the reverse-engineered Linux drivers, when the Mali versions are newer than supported by the kernel and Mesa.
The Arm GPUs do not have public technical documentation, not even at the level of NVIDIA, much less something comparable with AMD and Intel.
That's not true. Arm has been supporting the open source driver effort for the last couple years, but it's still behind the closed source one in terms of performance, features, and HW support.
Mali drivers are contributed by Arm:
Besides the Mali generations that are supported in the mainline kernel, there are many other Mali generations for which Arm has not provided anything else except closed-source drivers for Android, in a few cases also closed-source drivers for Linux. However, there are many other reverse-engineered Mali drivers, besides those from the mainline kernel.
It is good that Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel DRM drivers, but these drivers do little else except providing the means to communicate with the GPUs. The complex work is done in the user-space GPU drivers from Mesa.
The Mesa Lima driver, for older generations of Mali, does not have any contribution from Arm.
In the past, Mesa Panfrost was also completely reverse-engineered. Seeing that now Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel Panfrost DRM, I do not know whether they have started to contribute also to the Mesa Panfrost.
In any case, while some contributions to the previously reverse-engineered drivers are much better than nothing, what would have been much better is to publish the technical documentation of the Mali GPUs, in which case it would not have mattered whether Arm contributes something or not, as anyone could have written the drivers.
Yeah, that is why no one uses Steam, only old games there.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
No matter how you count it, PC gaming has been in decline for a long time.
And then Google has the gall to charge basically flagship prices for their under powered junk.
Personally I don't buy flagship phones because I don't use their full compute capabilities anyway, but a Pixel 11 would cost 2x what I paid for my Pixel 8. For 0 GPU performance improvement.
Then Samsung got the message, ran with it, and Google went "Ehh, we're good now."
I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by parents either; more on that below.
Second, they would make it a lot easier for competitors and patent trolls alike to seek litigation. One of the criteria thech companies have for filing a patent is how easy is it to detect when it is being violated. Open source your stuff, and you make it much easier for the competition to detect any violation.
And it is not like these companies are violating patents intentionally; much the opposite. But there are only so many ways to implement Vulkan or DirectX, and completely independent teams will come up with similar enough solutions, and with broad enough patents, that there will be overlap every now and then. That is why they file patents in the first place. Only the high cost of litigation and the risk of mutually-assured destruction keeps legitimate vendors from rattling sabers more often.
Then you have NVidia with their immense investment and advantage on the software side, from the CUDA runtime to countless libraries like CUBLAS and cuDNN. That investment goes much beyond a relatively simple Vulkan/DirectX driver.
So the question is less "why don't more of them open-source userland". The question is "why do any of them do it"?
Source: former insider with enough patents under my belt that I lost count.
Just speculating here. Maybe they have big customers that communicated to them that they will choose them over the competition if they open more of their software stack. Maybe they are less afraid of being sued because they are the underdog and they believe that the authorities would not be kind to a behemoth suing them, or they believe that the behemoth would not sue them because of the bad press it would generate vs the settlement they would get.
I actually don't know. But I am sure they have good reasons, just like the corps that keep it closed also have good reasons. It is not "good" vs "evil".
> First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by patents either
Then why does Apple allow Asahi to reverse-engineer their low-level APIs? Are their lawyers not paying attention?
Any conference talk schedule at one of these conferences (https://gameconfguide.com) will prove the point of how little they care.
It is all about gameplay, taking advantage of gaming IP, franchaises, how to squeeze the ultimate performance out of specific hardware, user engagement,....
You will find an occasional talk about open APIs, probably even done by some Khronos folks, and that's it.
> Moats were excavated around castles and other fortifications as part of the defensive system as an obstacle immediately outside the walls.
Unfortunate wording?
Steam units sold: 402M (2019) → 704M (2024), up 21% in 2024 alone.
Steam peak concurrent users: 3.52M in January 2011 → 42,042,778 on January 11, 2026. Roughly twelvefold, directly measured from Valve's API.
Valve's own disclosed number, which isn't an estimate by anyone: between August 2024 and August 2025, Steam averaged 109,000 people making their first ever purchase every day. That's about 40 million brand-new paying customers in one year.
Games released on Steam: ~8,100 in 2019 → 20,282 in 2025.
Steam gross revenue: $4.5B (2019) → roughly $16.9B (2025).
Some of the best selling games did come out roughly 15 years ago, but that's because they've been selling consistently ever since. Like Minecraft, the Witcher, etc.
Games released is not indicative of revenues: 80% of steam games make < $5k, and median steam game makes at most a few hundred $. So that doesn't really tell much about sales.
Recent data seems available in reports from Newzoo: their The PC & Console Gaming Report 2025 states there was 1.2% total PC growth 2021-2024 in nominal dollars (40.5B to $40-42B). In real dollars that is around -15%, so enough shrinkage that many industries would really feel the pain. In smaller sections, their 2014, 2017, 2024 reports show PC share of global games spend fell 17%. They (and SuperData) data show premium PC fell a few percent (nominal, more in real $). Playtime per player fell 26% (Newzoo 2024, 2025).
Also, around 50-60% of revenue, which is nice, is not new game sales, but microtransactions, and these are extremely weighted to the largest few games. Of the remaining, around 10-15% is subscription fees, also not new sales.
Using Steam as a proxy for the whole industry hides losses if more title % moved to Steam, since then the numbers you posted are not comparing like to like.
Some Newzoo data is easily found, use AI to find copies of their closed reports floating around the internet.
I do remember reading that that is the case for AMD, maybe one of their open source devs said it in an interview?
They've also been doing it for a long time now and the risks didn't seem to materialize, which surely helps with all the fears that you mentioned.