The LG G8 Review: Solid, But Not Great
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 30, 2019 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- LG
- Smartphones
- LG G8
- LG G8 ThinQ
GPU Performance
GPU and gaming performance of the G8 is something that is dictated by both the SoC as well as the phone's overall hardware design, specifically its thermal dissipation design.
We saw the Snapdragon 855 perform very well in the Galaxy S10, although the absolute improvements compared to the previous generation were quite conservative. Here the new LG G8 could distinguish itself by showcasing different thermal characteristics and possibly better sustained performance figures.
In the 3DMark Physics test which is mostly a CPU-bound workload within a GPU power constrained scenario, we indeed see the G8 performing better than the Galaxy S10+, which is a promising start. Huawei’s Kirin 980 phones here still lead the pack in terms of both peak as well as sustained performance.
The graphics test puts the G8 in line with the S10+ - both showcasing excellent performance. The Note9 still leads here due to Samsung having extremely lax thermal constraints on that device, resulting in quite high skin temperatures in long sustained scenarios.
In both Vulkan Aztec tests the G8 also leads the S10+ in the sustained performance department, even though the absolute improvements over last year’s G7 aren’t very big.
Finally, in Manhattan and T-Rex the G8 posts the most muted performance improvements over the G7, ending up almost identical sustained performance scores as last year’s phone. Here we also see the G8 tie with the Galaxy S10+.
Overall the GPU performance of the G8 and the Snapdragon 855 is very similar to that of the Galaxy S10+. The G8 is ahead of Samsung’s phone in some tests, which seems to be tied to more lax CPU thermal constraints. On other tests, the phone is pretty much in line with what we saw on the S10: conservative improvements over last year’s Snapdragon 845 phones such as the G7.
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abufrejoval - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
That is a very nice looking Ford Granada GLX!I sure did not expect one of those still in the wild, especially since the spare parts deposit burned down in 1977.
Great review!
LG earns a lot of respect that they keep on sending units to AT.
klingon55 - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
The LG G6 had an OLED display. So this is not the first.Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
The G6 was an LCD...808Hilo - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
Looks like a highly defective copy of my Essential ph-1. Which, after, 2 years, is still state of the art. I wonder why those large corps cannot make a single decent unflawed phone for a change.Wardrive86 - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
Looks like LG is using the same heat dissipation pipe on the G7 and G8. Average 18% more GPU peak performance, average 18% more GPU sustained performance in essentially the same body. Impressive IMOdr_pingu - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link
Had a g4 with the classic bootloop. Company never admited the bad manufacturing (officially in Spain). OFC never buying nor recomending brands like that, they can crash asap imovortmax2 - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link
"Here the G8 is not only noticeable slower as the new Galaxy S10 in both SoC variants, but it’s also noticeably slower than many of last year’s Snapdragon 855 devices."Think you meant '845 devices'.
KristenBrown - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
Awesome review!Mark Dirac - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Why on earth do LG not simply permit disabling of the camera's over sharpening? My LG G6's images were so dreadful that I didn't bother taking any photos with it for 6 months, until Open Camera introduced the capability to switch off the LG G6's sharpening and noise reduction (Camera2 API). At which point I found I had a pretty good camera.yindesu - Sunday, September 11, 2022 - link
> What is most shocking however is the fact that the G8 feels slower than the G7. In side-by-side comparisons between the two phones, the G8 is slower in opening a lot of applications or in-app views. This is extremely disappointing and clearly points out that LG has messed up somewhere in terms of the SoC’s BSP integration.Is it not explained by the G8 using eMMC storage when the G7 had UFS 2.1?