The Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Review, Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 is equipped with the Adreno 530 clocked at 624 MHz. In order to see how it performs, we ran it through our standard 2015 suite. In the future, we should be able to discuss how the Galaxy S7 performs in the context of our new benchmark suite as we test more devices on our new suite to determine relative performance.
At a high level, GPU performance appears to be mostly unchanged when comparing the Galaxy S7 to the Snapdragon 820 MDP. Performance in general is quite favorable assuming that the render resolution doesn't exceed 2560x1440.
Overall, the Adreno 530 is clearly one of the best GPUs you can get in a mobile device today. The Kirin 950's GPU really falls short in comparison. One could argue that turbo frequencies in a GPU don't make a lot of sense, but given that mobile gaming workloads can be quite bursty in nature and that gaming sessions tend to be quite short I would argue that having a GPU that can achieve significant levels of overdrive performance makes a lot of sense. The A9 is comparable if you consider the resolution of iOS devices, but when looking at the off-screen results the Adreno 530 pulls away. Of course, the real question now is how the Adreno 530 compares to the Exynos 8890's GPU in the international Galaxy S7, but that's a question that will have to be left for another day.
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Michael Wilding - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Great write up Josh. I'm looking forward to seeing the camera performance, and the Adreno 530 is a beast! Let's hope performance can be sustained without significant throttling.warreo - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Yes, somewhat disappointed that overheating wasn't addressed in Part 1 given Andrei's skewering of Samsung's use of a heatpipe and his comments that the S7 got pretty hot under load. Hope it gets addressed in detail for Part 2!Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
That is awesome that in EU will have Exynos 8890 .. crappy SD820 battery drainer..Azurael - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link
I seem to recall that real world battery life has traditionally been worse on Samsung SoCs than Qualcomm's mainly due to the modems using a lot more power - hopefully they've resolved that this generation... Personally, I'm disappointed that we get the Exynos version in Europe because it means there will probably never be a fully working AOSP port.leexgx - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
be nice to add CUBOT H1 results in there as well (i had the phone for like a month or 2 now and 2 days of active use is lovely without having to use an external battery that norm would still only last me a day on my last phone)my use i am typically getting 8 hours screen on time (i use GPS a lot so i never expect to get the 12 hours screen on time, or probably mythical 15-18 hours if anandtech benched it for power)
leexgx - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
anandtech review http://www.anandtech.com/show/9868/cubot-h1-smartp...not sure if the phone is fully suitable for USA due to 3G and (real) 4G Bands been used on the phone
Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
Huawei Mate 8 rocks .. still !jjj - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
A throttling result for the Exynos variant of the Edge with a 42% drop http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/1147/images/...MaxIT - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
... as usual. Samsung and Qualcomm just can't balance their system. They just look for a benchmark number to impress people and try to be competitive with Apple. But that's just a smoke curtain...jjj - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
There is finally a GFXBench long term perf result for the MI5 https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx40&am...There are some complications though, the device is just 1080p, the 60FPS limit,no heatpipe. While keeping all that in mind, we do see a 37% drop and this test is not the worst case scenario. Hopefully Andrei will have a better test based on OpenGL ES 3.x or test it with some actual games since T-Rex is becoming outdated.