Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon to Revolutionize Game Latency Testing: 960fps Camera With No Time Limit

Qualcomm has detailed information on its new flagship SoC for 2020 in the Snapdragon 865. The new System on Chip delivers a 25 percent CPU and GPU increase over the Snapdragon 855 and the camera performance pipeline will be able to revolutionize game latency testing.

Continuous High-Def High Speed Video at 960fps 720p. No Time Limit!

ArsTechnica reports that the CPU in the 865 has gone from the Kryo 485 to the Kryo 585, switching up the ARM Cortex A76 to the A77 cores, which is great, but the real improvement comes in the camera performance of the Spectra 480 image signal processor (ISP).

The camera co-processor has a maximum processing bandwidth of 2 gigapixels per second allowing for video capture modes of 8K at 30fps and 4K at 120fps. The high-speed recording is still capped at 960fps at 720p, but you’ll be able to continuously record at that speed indefinitely now.

This is going to be massive for game latency testing. Blur Busters uses Scan-Out as one of the applications that we use for high-speed cameras and tests G-SYNC latency too, so having these new SoCs continuously recording 960fps at 720p is going to be a great test!

Qualcomm has not integrated 5G into the Snapdragon 865 though, and this will require a separate Snapdragon X55 chip, and will force all flagships coming out next year to ship with the 5G X55. This could indicate higher pricing and less battery life.

Game Latency Testing Of The Future

A mainstream cheap infinite-recording high-def high-speed camera, with millisecond accuracy, combined with smartphone app programming. That is some amazing latency testing opportunities for game developers and researchers. The imagination is limitless with this combination.