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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Arch_Fiend - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Very good review the S7 is a beast but so is my iPhone 6s plus. I wish I could afford to have 2 high-end smartphones because I would definitely by the S7 if I could because its finally the android phone i've been waiting for.Cant wait for review part 2.
misteroh - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
I'm very glad you updated your battery testing methodology. I have the LG G4 and my personal experience with its battery life is MUCH closer to your 2016 test results than the 2013. The older test would have you believe it has much better than average battery life, but I personally find myself charging it much more often than I want to.stlc8tr - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
I'm curious about the microSD card slot performance. If you put a fast (<80MB) microSD card in the GS7, are you going to see the difference over a slower card?Also, how fast is the USB MTP performance? Did Samsung re-introduce a USB3 connection?
tipoo - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
It would depend on what you put on the card. Videos and music would probably see no difference. Apps, and if the camera can write directly to the card, maybe.H4CTOR96 - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
I put a Sandisk 64gb Extreme on mine and A1 SD Bench returns 60Mb/s read and 40Mb/s write. For comparison the Internal storage works at 300 read and 150 write....Then I put in a crappy $7 32gb sd card and it scored 1032 write and 1.02 read, so yeah there was something wrong with that one XD
name99 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
"Of course, other than the workload the device setup has been held constant across these tests by equalizing ... disabling all background sync to the best of my ability."Is this really a good idea? Id argue that part of what you are buying when you buy these devices is proper setup. (Certainly, for example, that's part of what Apple would say they are selling.) As such, I'd consider that the right way to benchmark them is in some sort of "as close to out-the-box" state as possible. Sign up for everything the device asks you to sign up for out the box. (For Apple that will be to enter an AppleID, for Android I assume it will always ask for a Google ID and then some random collection of additional logins that people have paid the phone vendor to request.)
Then see how the phone behaves under those conditions. The Apple pone will presumably occasionally sync with iCloud. The Android phone will sync with various Google Services. And if the vendor asked you to sign up for "MyWannabe Social Network" and "MyWannabe Social Network" delivers ads to the device every three minutes, constantly sucking up power and CPU, THAT IS THE EXPERIENCE THE PHONE IS SELLING YOU.
Vendors that sell crap like that should accept the consequences in reviews. It's not AnandTech's job to spend an hour scrubbing some phone of useless crap. It is, in fact, AnandTech's job to run the phone with precisely all that crap enabled --- and then let us know the results.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
By background syncing Josh is mostly referring to disabling application auto-updates and other such services which can have an impact on battery life tests. The usual small sync services and GMS have little to no noticeable impact on these tests.I disagree on your viewpoint about out-of-box software settings simply because the phones have different software and services depending on your region. North American units from carriers will have different settings and services than the international units. We don't always get samples from the same carrier even. AnandTech has been first and foremost a hardware site so I think it's correct to try to minimize the effect of such services to get a better representation of what the device itself is capable of, not what the carriers choose to add in or not.
Again, this is all overblown as in practice we see little to no effect on our tests and again we're mostly referring to auto-updates and the like which can eat up singificant amount of CPU cycles.
name99 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
" Always-On Display is nice to have, but for some reason it only polls the ambient light sensor, so the display won’t actually turn off in your pocket. As a result I turned it off as it’s clearly going to be contributing to idle battery drain in situations where it shouldn’t."Like I said...
I think it is not helpful to improving phones generally when reviewers accept stupidity like this.
If Samsung ship with a feature that's not ready for primetime, the review numbers (in this case battery life) should show it. I don't understand why so many phone users are willing to make excuses for manufacturers and just accept babysitting their machines, manually switching on and off GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, NFC, etc as the situation demands.
My devices should damn well operate themselves, not rely on me to do it for them.
adityarjun - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
If you do a quick google search, you'll see that a lot of users are still facing keyboard lag. Check reddit and xda.I would like to hear your thoughts on the same and whether you are also facing such issues.
jhh - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Still disappointed that Samsung didn't at least allow enabling using the SD card as extended internal memory. Yes, some people want to swap the cards in and out, but others have found they have run out of internal memory, and have no choice but to buy a new phone without this feature.