Experimental Turnip driver for Snapdragon 865

Turnip SD865 Z targets Retroid Pocket 5 and Flip 2

October 12, 2026

AlexSanz0902’s Turnip SD865 “Z” is a new experimental Vulkan driver aimed specifically at Snapdragon 865 and its Adreno 650 GPU. That makes it interesting to the Retroid Pocket 5 and Snapdragon version of the Pocket Flip 2 owners.

The first public release arrived on October 11. It modifies Mesa’s Turnip driver with changes to image compression, texture filtering, rendering and GPU synchronization. The old Snapdragon apparently still has a few frames hiding inside its silicone core.

There is an important notice: testing was performed on one Retroid Pocket 5, with its GPU overclocked to 905 MHz, using Eden 0.2.0-rc2. These are the developer’s results, not AndroGaming.com benchmarks, and there are no published Flip 2 measurements (although, I do plan to test this myself soon).

Developer reports

The comparison uses StevenMXZ’s Turnip v26.3.0-R5, rather than Qualcomm’s system driver, as its baseline. The README reports the following results using the same device, game and scene:

Test	Turnip v26.3.0-R5	SD865 Z
1× docked, listed as 1080p	49.9fps	59.9fps, at the game’s cap
1.25× docked, listed as 1350p	33fps	49.2fps

The tested games were Link’s Awakening, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Dragon Ball FighterZ and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The developer reports no crashes or device reboots during testing.

BUT, that does not make this release universal fix for Snapdragon 865 crashes. The underlying cause has not been identified, and two stability changes were introduced together, so their individual effects have not been isolated.

Extra performance from where?

According to the developer, most of the improvement comes from keeping certain render targets tiled and compressed using Adreno’s UBWC compression. The intent is to avoid the more expensive uncompressed layout used for those images.

There is a correctness tradeoff here. The README warns that games writing into a compressed image from a shader can produce corrupted graphics, but no such case was reported in the five tested games.

Another change makes texture filtering cheaper by disabling anisotropic filtering, simplifying filtering between mip levels and adjusting texture detail selection, so distant textures and surfaces viewed at an angle can look less sharp.

The remaining changes preserve early rejection of hidden pixels in certain situations, tune compilation for the processor, force direct rendering and add synchronization around image readbacks. The latter two draw on existing community work aimed at Adreno 6xx stability.

Trying it on a Pocket 5 or Flip 2

Download Turnip-SD865-26.3.0-Z.zip from the release assets (our mirror below). Import the ZIP directly through your emulator’s GPU driver manager, select it and restart the game. Do not extract it first.

The README currently uses a slightly different download filename ending in -Comunidad.zip; the published release asset is the filename above.

Keep your existing driver available for comparison. Initial stutters while shaders are recompiled is normal, so compare the same scene after that settles.

Known issues include a blue tint on some Dragon Ball FighterZ HUD textures and the reduced texture sharpness described above. The build uses Mesa’s development branch, and the developer says it has not been reviewed by Mesa developers.illing to trade.