Happy weekend!

There has been a lot of news related to benchmarking lately, including an admission by Google that they blocked Play Store downloads of benchmarking apps during the Pixel 8 review embargo, as well as fresh chips coming down the pipeline by Qualcomm and MediaTek.

Discussion questions:

  • Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
  • Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?

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  • Max-P
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    fedilink
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    41 year ago

    I think a good review of the overall perceived performance is more important. Some phones are fairly powerful on paper in their specs, but real world performance can be very different. That might not even show in benchmarks: CPU might score great, GPU might score great, but somehow day to day performance even just scrolling the home screen is horrible. I’ve even seen phones where 3D games render faster than just a plain 2D scrolling in the settings app.

    I guess benchmarks can be useful to put some numbers on, but most don’t end up benchmarking the Android APIs just the raw performance. But it’s not gonna catch that the CPU<>GPU bandwidth is insufficient for a basic ScrollView to be smooth as new items gets rendered.

    My Galaxy S7 ended up slower than even a an aging Galaxy Nexus or Nexus 5 despite being much better in most specs, even running the display at 720p instead of 1440p, resolution didn’t make a difference whatsoever. My OneTouch Idol 3 was unbearingly slow despite having the exact same chipset as a Motorola model that ran butter smooth.