The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
GPU Performance
Much like the System Performance section, I’m not expecting any big surprises in the GPU performance section. The Kirin 980 uses a Mali G76MP10 at 720MHz and while the chip isn’t blazing as much as the competition, it still performs adequately well and is a significant upgrade to last year’s Kirin 970.
In the 3DMark Sling Shot physics test, the P30s are taking the top spots in terms of performance, both in peak as well as sustained figures. The limitation here lies mainly on the part of the CPU as well as its thermal throttling characteristics. Both the P30 and P30 Pro barely throttle in this regard, at least not in GPU power constrained scenarios.
In the graphics test, we see expected results on the P30 Pro, however on the smaller P30 there’s essentially no thermal throttling at all, which is extremely peculiar.
P30 Overheating Warning & App shutdown
Shockingly enough, I didn’t manage to make the P30 throttle at all in any of the tests, as before it could even get to a point of thermal equilibrium, the OS would shut down the application and raise a thermal overheating warning. I don’t know what’s going on with devices nowadays that this keeps happening as I’ve encountered the issue in last year’s Qualcomm Galaxy S9+ with release firmware as well. The last time this happened, it was due to disabling of the thermal throttling when the OS was detecting benchmarking applications, however in our case we’re using altered application IDs. Still even with this the smaller P30 overheated repeatedly. The fact that this is an OS warning means it’s triggered by a different driver than the usual SoC thermal drivers, so something must be off on the current firmware.
In the GFXBench Vulkan High benchmark we see both P30 and P30 Pro neck-in-neck with quite excellent performance. Again what is interesting here is that both devices perform significantly better than the Mate 20s and the View20 with the same chipset. I explain this through the fact that the P30s come with newer GPU drivers, and Arm must have made more significant improvements in their Vulkan drivers.
In the Normal variant of the Aztec benchmark, we see the P30 Pro throttle a little more, yet it still manages to showcase much better performance figures than the Mate 20, and also higher peak figures than the Mate 20 Pro & View20. The smaller P30 here posts the best figures, however its sustained performance is so high simply because the device is getting extremely hot. I’ve argued if I should be posting the figures for the P30 at all since if you continue to load the device in this manner it’ll simply crash the application.
Overall, GPU performance of the P30s is in line with that of last year’s Snapdragon 845 phones, which is still great. Huawei and HiSilicon still trail behind Samsung’s Exynos Mali GPU implementations, although the difference isn’t all that big this generation.
I hope that Huawei figures out the thermal issues on the smaller P30 and issues a firmware update, I’ll be updating the article with the relevant data once this is all sorted out.
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BabelHuber - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
Just try to fix a bug via Magisk without root, or install a system-wide ad blocker (not only in the browser, but for each and any app). Or try to install a black overlay on WhatsApp or Instagram with the Samsung theme engine 🙄No, you simply don't get the features of substratum and Magisk without root.
zeeBomb - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link
Any specificiations of the Purism 5? Enticing device, looks like it's taking a jab to BBM...marko94 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
im an accountant and tech lover, but until i have a reliable information of the actual cost of manufacturing a device, i wont necessarily call it overpriced. expensive. maybe, not overpriced. there's a difference.cpkennit83 - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
Average selling price will be down by 250€ in 2 months. If thats not proof enought the device is overpriced i dont know what is. Not specific to Huawei though, Samsung does it too. Only Apple and One plus tend tonstick to the same price for the entire life of the deviceMightyGadget - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
I had exactly the same thoughts on the 5x telephoto zoom, which I have not seen many people mention. I did use the phone at the same time as the Black Shark 2 recently and loved having the zoom over 2x that the Black Shark offered, but I think 3x is a bit more versatile. But yeah, in most cases, I think people will benefit from the low light photography more than 5x & 10x zoom.They should just add another 3x telephoto lens for next years model!
WPX00 - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
The value equation with the S10 is wildly better for the P30 here in Asia. In Indonesia:P30 8/128: IDR 10 million (709 USD)
P30 Pro 8/256: IDR 13 million (922 USD)
S10e 6/128: IDR 10.5 million (745 USD)
S10 8/128: IDR 13 million (922 USD)
S10+ 8/128: IDR 14 million (993 USD)
The P30 is both lower priced and comes with double the storage of the base S10+, and is the same cost with the S10 vanilla with double the storage.
s.yu - Thursday, April 25, 2019 - link
You do get a notably worse screen, speakers, and SoC with the P30, also the expensive proprietary storage, and the build is questionable as they're still holding on to the scratchable plastic sandwich screen construction from the P20.To some people with certain needs the P30 may be of better value than the S10, but it's still the worst in value by far of almost all Chinese smartphones. At this price range go get a Reno 10x version, get a top tier Mi9, the latest Meizu or Oneplus 7 or anything else.
s.yu - Thursday, April 25, 2019 - link
BTW, look for grey imported Samsung as they're often cheaper (I did a 10-second search and found the SD855 ver. 8/128 S10 at CNY4650 which is less than USD690 on Taobao, the Exynos ver. 8/128 S10 at CNY 4158, while the "official" local price is CNY5999, lol), whereas you probably won't find any grey imported Chinese smartphones. They're without official warranty but I'm on my third smartphone without a warranty and I've never encountered an issue nor regretted the savings.ezekiel68 - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
That one time I read a review of the Huawei P30 family and came to understand that the Honor View20 was all I wanted and more at a better price. (Yes, I know it's the same parent company)Roy2002 - Friday, April 26, 2019 - link
Huawei has the best cameras now.