Samsung Galaxy S6

[agrabren]

Keep in mind that when trying to compare different SoC performance, you're also asking a company which focuses on CPU performance (ARM/Qualcomm/Samsung/Intel) to deliver powerful graphics drivers. The CPU itself has a minimal "driver" stack in the kernel to make it operate correctly. Applications like Dolphin use native instructions on these processors which are handled directly by the CPU. There is no driver layer involved in most of the operations (with the exception of kernel protected operations). But graphics is a completely different beast. Applications don't "compile" native GPU code. They make calls through a driver layer. The driver then processes the request, making the appropriate calls to the GPU using the native instructions of the GPU. For a GPU, drivers can be equally as important as the GPU itself. So NVIDIA does have a leg-up in this area due to being a graphics card business. And you can see the difference in problems between the SoCs. Tegra is seldom used in phones due to power and heat (this is an assumption on my part, re-using the reason listed above. I have no actual knowledge of specific power/thermal requirements or specs on any of the Tegra processors). On a larger device, this is less important because this can be overcome with larger batteries and better heat dissipation. While NVIDIA isn't as good at low thermals and low power consumption in a smaller package, it has more powerful graphics and a more refined graphics driver (including full OGL).