GFXBench ran on the most platforms, and even ran on my non-jailbroken 1st Gen Fire TV Stick, while the other benchmarks required touch controls to run.

Android devices use OpenGL ES, and now Vulkan as their 3D APIs.  GFXBench runs tests focused on different generations of this API.  The oldest GPUs only support OpenGL ES 2.0, and a huge fraction of Android games are written to this API to cover the most devices.

OpenGL ES 2.0

Here you can see “On Screen” performance on the benchmarks.  On Screen performance in GPU testing is typically the most relevant thing, as it’s telling us how the device will perform.  I need to dig in a little, because not all the OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmarks ran on the 2016 Fire HD 8.  You can see that the 2017 Fire TV trails the 2015 Fire TV by a significant margin as a result of both thermal limits in the dongle package and the selection of a lower power chipset.

Here you can see “Off Screen” performance on the benchmarks.  On Screen performance in GPU testing is typically a little less relevant thing to how the device will perform, and more a measure of how strong the GPU is.  Basically the same load is run no matter how high or low the resolution of the attached screen.  Again, the 2017 Fire TV is a step back.

OpenGL ES 3.x

The next set of Benchmarks are OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1.  This captures devices made in the last few years and applications written targeting these devices.

Here you can see “On Screen” performance on the benchmarks.  On Screen performance in GPU testing is typically the most relevant thing, as it’s telling us how the device will perform.

One thing that’s apparent here is that going cheap on the SoC supplier has cost performance.  While there were some compatibility issues with the OpenGL ES 3.1 testing, in the 3.0 testing the 2013 Fire HDX handily beats the 2016 Fire HD.

Additionally, the latest and greatest 2017 and 2018 Fire TVs don’t support anything above OpenGL 2.0.

Here you can see “Off Screen” performance on the benchmarks.  On Screen performance in GPU testing is typically a little less relevant thing to how the device will perform, and more a measure of how strong the GPU is.  Basically the same load is run no matter how high or low the resolution of the attached screen.

Again we can see the 2013 Kindle Fire HDX 7 beating the 2016 Fire HD 8 handily in 2 of the 3 raw power tests.

Update Notes

• 7/28/18 Updates
  • Added 2017 Fire TV and discussion
  • Clarified devices that don’t support OpenGL ES 3.x

Next Page

Previous Page

• Page 1 – Introduction
• Page 2 – Geekbench
• Page 3 – GFX Bench
• Page 4 – 3D Mark
• Page 5 – Conclusions