Hi Nothing Community,
I’d like to request an update to the Phone 2a’s GPU drivers in a later update.
Digging through the kernel, it appears the 2a’s GPU drivers are almost 2 years old and there are significantly newer drivers from ARM that have demonstrated performance gains.
The current nothing driver for the G610 GPU appears to be r38p1 released in August 2022. The current release is r49, this essentially puts the 2a’s GPU drivers 2 years and 11 updates behind current and is likely significantly diminishing the 2a’s potential performance.
The Pixel 8 (which uses a more powerful, but similar in architecture Mali G715 GPU, whereas the 2a uses the G610) shipped with the same driver, when it got updated to the most recent driver from ARM there were apparently some pretty big performance gains.
Sources: Here and Here
I understand that most phone manufacturers don’t bother ever updating the GPU drivers from the first version the phone shipped with, as it requires some dev effort to test and integrate the updates from ARM, even though they’re released on a pretty regular basis.
I would love it if Nothing could step up to the plate here and offer current and future owners an update that could help significantly with the device’s longevity.
Cheers