The Sony Xperia 1 Review: A 21:9 Take of the World
by Andrei Frumusanu on July 26, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Sony
- Smartphones
- Xperia 1
GPU Performance
3D performance of the Xperia 1 is dictated by both the SoC’s GPU and power efficiency, as well as the device’s thermal dissipation design. I found Sony’s design quite weird in this regard as there’s some discrepancy in terms of the resulting thermal performance. For one the SoC is seemingly located on the right next to the cameras which is by far the phone’s hottest hot-spot during heavy operation. I found that however this heat isn’t nearly as well dissipated to the whole body of the phone as other designs, and there’s a big delta between the skin temperature near the SoC and the bottom half of the phone.
In the 3DMark physics test, the CPU throttling situation was actually quite dire as the phone lost more than half of its peak performance during prolonged thermal loads, which is the worst showing of a Snapdragon 855 phone yet, at least in terms of the CPU behaviour.
However when looking at the GPU behaviour, we’re seeing the Xperia 1 not faring nearly as badly, with the phone only trailing the OnePlus 7 Pro which had exemplary throttling behaviour.
The figures continue in a similar pattern for all our other GPU-bound 3D tests, showcasing that the Xperia 1 is surprisingly able to maintain quite high GPU performance even though its thermal dissipation design isn’t the best. It’s an interesting juxtaposition between how the CPU throttles and how the GPU throttles, and it’s obvious the GPU is being given more leeway in terms of the peak temperatures it’s allowed to reach.
Overall, unless your game is quite CPU intensive, the Xperia 1 should offer still quite excellent gaming experience. It’s to be also noted that even though the device does have a 4K screen, games will be rendered at 1440p which is less demanding. Sony doesn’t offer any gaming tools which could further optimise performance or the experience – for example I think the phone would have greatly benefited from a 1080p gaming mode, however the Xperia 1 has to rely on actual games resolution scaling to further improve performance if necessary.
Another gaming aspect of the Xperia 1 that is unique to Sony’s phones is the fact that the phone out of the box supports PS4 remote play, in which your PlayStation 4 is able to stream the game to your phone. You’re also able to pair up with the DualShock 4 game controller - the combination definitely is an interesting. (Note: Yes it’s also possible to do this on non-Sony devices with a modified APK)
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Samus - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
So this is going to need a custom ROM to get proper 4K rendering across applications? How the hell is a 4K screen useful if the only thing it shows at 4K are photos?Lord of the Bored - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"the included headphones are 3.5mm"No standard headphone port, includes standard headphones.
I ... I can't make fun of this. It is too easy, I'd feel bad.
Cliff34 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
Given that Sony also makes the camera, it will make sense or a stronger marketing strategy if the phone's strong suit is the camera.Hopefully, the next model the smart phone team can work w the camera team to integrate in a way that blows away the competition.
Having a big screen and a small battery is a hard sale. Plus the steep price Tag.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"Given that Sony also makes the camera"this appears to be a case of the cobbler's kids going barefoot. aren't most high end phone cameras sourced from Sony?
5j3rul3 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
So where's the test results of Xperia 1's Loudspeakers in the article?nandnandnand - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
"While the panel is indeed 4K"3840 x 1644 = 76% of 4K UHD
s.yu - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
The detail retention surprised me. There's clear evidence of heavy sharpening and strange artifacts in the clouds and/or shadows, but yes, some of the increase in detail retention can't be explained by mere sharpening.The results here are better than at GSMA, maybe it's sample variation, but the artifacts are quite often disturbing, like leaves that look munched up by bugs. Apart from crushed blacks, the Pixel's output still seems the best, since it avoids the artifacts, and Apple's SmartHDR also balances between noise retention, artifact generation and detail retention. For example the shadow cast by the tree onto the street(scene 3), there are still tiles in that shadow, yet only the Pixel and XS could recover the tiles with texture in a way that's more or less consistent with the tiles around it under sunlight, while Sony left a smear there and Huawei's texture still seems aggregated and fake. Also in the indoor shot Sony failed in several places regarding texture, it smeared fibers and wood. Sony seems to have gone too far leaving artifacts everywhere.
The sharpness of the UWA is clearly because of the uncorrected barrel distortion, it's half a fisheye which is much easier to correct CA for while the others are largely rectilinear, but the P30P has a narrower FoV, which also makes it easier to correct. The fact that the S10+ is as wide as the Xperia yet as corrected and as sharp as the P30P makes it the better UWA.
s.yu - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
At night I believe metering is still a significant issue, devices/instances that expose to the right get much better results overall...and I believe the P30P fakes UWA shots in certain instances, only the peripherals (over 50% in area) are managed by the UWA while the center is actually data from the main, the transition is quite obvious in the tunnel shot...I believe there is some sort of merging going on in the Xperia shots. The artifacts in the clouds in certain daylight shots resemble those in LR during an HDR DNG capture, if there's merging in the day there's no sense it doesn't merge at night. That result also seems too stable (if above 1/2s) even considering the OIS.
Zumaso - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
niceUtilityMax - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I really wonder if the architecture with separate CPUs for three types of different workloads is basically a gimmick to score well on single-core benchmarks. Considering that many OEMs still haven't figured out how to optimize well for the big.LITTLE architectures with separate CPUs for only two types of workloads.