The ASUS ROG Phone II Review: Mobile Gaming First, Phone Second
by Dr. Ian Cutress on September 30, 2019 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Asus
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- ROG
- RGB
- Snapdragon 855 Plus
- ROG Phone II
Machine Learning Inference Performance
AIMark 3
AIMark makes use of various vendor SDKs to implement the benchmarks. This means that the end-results really aren’t a proper apples-to-apples comparison, however it represents an approach that actually will be used by some vendors in their in-house applications or even some rare third-party app.
Unfortunately for the ROG Phone II, it’s another device that’s lacking the proper Qualcomm proprietary libraries that AI Mark makes use of, ending up not being in the charts anywhere as the application couldn’t start.
AIBenchmark 3
AIBenchmark takes a different approach to benchmarking. Here the test uses the hardware agnostic NNAPI in order to accelerate inferencing, meaning it doesn’t use any proprietary aspects of a given hardware except for the drivers that actually enable the abstraction between software and hardware. This approach is more apples-to-apples, but also means that we can’t do cross-platform comparisons, like testing iPhones.
We’re publishing one-shot inference times. The difference here to sustained performance inference times is that these figures have more timing overhead on the part of the software stack from initialising the test to actually executing the computation.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI CPU
We’re segregating the AIBenchmark scores by execution block, starting off with the regular CPU workloads that simply use TensorFlow libraries and do not attempt to run on specialized hardware blocks.
We performed the AI Benchmark tests in the default mode of the phone, and here the ROG Phone II lands relatively in average to better than average amongst S855 devices.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI INT8
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP16
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP32
The same conclusion can be had of the INT8, FP16 and FP32 scores. It’s odd that the FP32 scores aren’t better than that of the competition as the workload is accelerated by the GPU, and we had expected the S855+’s higher GPU frequency to have a larger impact on this score.
We also have to note that if it weren’t for a very recent firmware update from ASUS we wouldn’t be able to publish any AI benchmarks at all, as it previously lacked the proper NNAPI drivers. As such, it seems that this aspect was pretty much just an afterthought for the phone rather than something that was on a critical to-do list.
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Vince789 - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Also it would have been interesting to see the GPU power consumption, and how it compares to the regular 855BramEPC - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Not really specific for this phone but would it be possible in general to indicate what version of USB (2.0, 3.* gen * (x *), ... PD ? ) the phone supports ? USB-C is not very helpful.Sharma_Ji - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Bottom type C is 2.0Side is 3.1
Now someone might get headache when they see me transferring files to PC and my phone connected to it through the side.😅
Notmyusualid - Saturday, October 5, 2019 - link
@ Sharma - THIS is true! Thanks for the tip buddy!Here is one for you - International ROM working on Chinese 'Tencent' 8G/128G version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVIWWMtqHp4
I won't try it until back home, so I don't leave myself high & dry on the road with a bricked phone.
Notmyusualid - Saturday, October 5, 2019 - link
@ me - sorry, here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPrQidE5H0o
brucethemoose - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
This was touched on, but if you can take the modest battery hit, a 120hz display (and low latency touch input) is an amazing experience *outside* of games. Pretty much any app that involves scrolling feels so much more responsive.s.yu - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
I also found that by setting animations to x0.5 in developer settings everything's more snappy. Turning it off entirely may save another fraction of a second but it may seem subjectively laggy.airdrifting - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
LOL 6000mAh battery, take my money please.But seriously, when can we have a flagship with 5000mAh battery? Who is going to be the first one to do it? Oneplus? Huawei? Xiaomi? I know it's not going to be Samsung or Apple.
Sharma_Ji - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Only asus did this with 6Z , @ 5000mah battery.Lochtror - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
helloi play 2 competitive online mobile games regularly. also while in public transport.
that made me realize that a feature a game oriented, or well, any high end phone, should offer is redundant internet connection with fast switching to which connection is better.
so... dual sim with two data lines active.
but also acess to 2 wifi networks at the same time with the same function. making sure the connection stays ups as well as possible.
does any device have something like that already?
or does the dualsim mobile data in other devices work better than in my phones?