Qualcomm's Vulkan drivers are hot garbage, so I'm not surprised Turnip was seen as more desirable. I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
I suppose from the outside I cant meaningfully distinguish from hardware or software bugs except in a few cases. Doesn't change the outcome for us either, it's not like we can rely on driver updates to be shipped on Android. Many extensions are broken like extended dynamic state to the point of being unusable. We've hit plenty of issues in the driver shader compiler too, even in Vulkan 1.0 features like relaxed precision.
We've hit a ton of bugs on the adreno 830, with even basic stuff like barriers being broken.
The problem isn't exclusive to Qualcomm fwiw, we've run into plenty of bugs in ARM's driver. Apple's too
Android has entire API for handling driver failures:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...
Hardware can have issues, but firmware and drivers usually work around those issues. When firmware and drivers crash, you get "masterpieces" like the one above.
Qualcomm is by a lot of accounts on HN a law firm with a side hustle of selling chips.
> I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
Often when people run into problems with a GPU they blame "the drivers". How confident are you that the problems you ran into originated from the drivers, and not from other sources, such as the hardware itself? Just because an issue goes away with a driver update it doesn't mean that the problem originated in the driver -- most of the time what happens is that they found a hardware bug and implemented yet another software workaround.
I am not throwing the HW folks under the bus, either. The hardware is immensely complex and it's not that they can release a new revision every month.
One of the main responsibilities of GPU drivers is working around the bugs that are found after hardware is released. That, and getting all the blame.