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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jjj - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Oh wow, you had 1 must do here, run GFXBench long time perf and you fail to do so, keeping everybody in the dark about the 1 thing we don't know.That 1 key result has 10 time more value today than this article...
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
There was enough time to run one battery life benchmark or the other one. We picked the web benchmark, as that's the more useful of the two.hans_ober - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Add it for the full review.Hoping for a deepdive on S820/ Exynos/Kirin950/A9? like the E7420 deepdive you guys did.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
You'll see a GFXBench rundown in part 2.As for a deep-dive, we'll be doing some architectural information, though power logging ala the E7420 review will be a separate, larger writeup.
hans_ober - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
You've made my day :)jjj - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
If true that's a bad business decision especially when you did run 2 different battery tests.The fact that the article tries to dismiss the GPU throttling by claiming that mobile gaming is short sessions does seem to suggest a lack of understanding. Sure casual gamers that dgame just to waste time will go for short sessions and less demanding games but for them the perf is also of little to no relevance. Users that should care about the GPU perf are the ones that play longer sessions.It's also of dubious ethics to label the GPU perf in any way without knowing this key metric and not doing so is essential in differentiating AT from others.
Cygni - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Mad about telephone reviews.Kepe - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Why don't you just start your own tech-related website and write your own reviews, "jjj". You don't seem to do anything other than bitch and moan about every single conceivable thing you can come up with. Just gtfo and do things better by yourself, as you seem to know how everything should be done. If you write some good stuff, maybe you'll earn a buck or two, too.maximumGPU - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
Second that. Never read anything except criticism from that guy on every post. Gets old very quickly.retrospooty - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link
3rd it... I was on with him on a separate thread. Seriously hard headed, and overthinking it.