The Samsung Galaxy S20+, S20 Ultra Exynos & Snapdragon Review: Megalomania Devices
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 3, 2020 9:30 AM ESTBattery Life: Good (60Hz) to Average (120Hz)
Last week we had published our initial battery life report on the S20 series, with some interesting findings. First of all, what needs to be mentioned again is that the new 120Hz display modes on the phones come with a quite large battery life impact. The behavior is exhibited on all our S20 models at hand and I think it’s likely due to the panel itself or the DDIC. Samsung had included various display refresh modes varying from 48, 60, 96 and 120Hz, however we have yet to find evidence of any mechanism that actively switches between the various modes.
As such, even on a black static screen, running at 120Hz comes with a quite steep power penalty that’s always present whenever the display is on, costing around 160mW of power.
I had noted that I found our variant of the Snapdragon 865 Galaxy S20 Ultra to have worse idle power than our Exynos phone version. Initially I had attributed this to possibly the SoC or even the nature of the external X55 modem, but since then I’ve also received an LG V60 and that device’s idle power is perfectly normal. The only other thing that differentiates our S20 Ultra here is the fact that it has the extra mmWave antennas and RF systems. It would be interesting to see if non-mmWave variants of the Snapdragon S20 Ultra behave any differently (Tip at our Chinese or Korean readers).
I also had made mention that the “Performance” mode of the Exynos S20 phones seemingly behaved quite overzealously in terms of its scheduling settings, and there was a quite drastic increase in power draw for what was not nearly an as drastic increase in performance. I’ve rerun the battery tests in the “Optimized” settings which doesn’t have the “Increased system speed” option enabled, and I’ve confirmed my suspicion as the battery life figures did improve by some notable amounts. I’ve also tested the Snapdragon in the “Optimized” setting and the runtimes only differed by 2% - for users having the Snapdragon versions it’s thus safe to simply leave that enabled.
In our web test, the new S20 series end up right about where you’d expect them to. The Snapdragon 865 Galaxy S20 Ultra at 60Hz fares the best amongst the tested models, and now represents Samsung’s longest lasting flagship device. Slightly behind it we find the Exynos S20 Ultra at 60Hz. The difference between the two phones here isn’t very big in this test, and I attribute this to the higher constant idle power draw of the Snapdragon phone which counteracts the much higher compute efficiency of the SoC. The Eyxnos S20+ ends up slightly behind the S10+ phones, but still lasts a good 12.65h in this test.
Once we turn on the 120Hz display modes, the battery life results on all the phones drops quite notably. The Snapdragon S20 Ultra goes from 14h to 11.3h, a 20% drop. The same applies to the Exynos S20 Ultra, with a 20% drop, but for some reason the S20+ sees a larger drop of 25%. In the systems performance section I did mention that there’s some software configuration differences between the Exynos S20 Ultra and S20+, maybe some of that plays part here in the results.
Overall, the conclusion on battery life isn’t quite as black & white as we thought it would be. The key point is to stay away from the seemingly broken Performance mode on the Exynos chipset and you’ll have roughly similar battery life results between the two SoC variants of the S20. Naturally, that’s only being achieved by the fact that the Exynos does showcase worse performance, saving energy by using the more efficient lower performance states more.
What’s valid for all variants of the phones is that the 120Hz display mode is quite the power hog. Samsung probably has the opportunity to improve this by introducing a better managed variable refresh rate mode that actually changes between the different refresh rates based on content, something that seemingly isn’t happening right now. Also switching to lower refresh rates when showcasing static content would be a huge power saver, but I’m not sure if Samsung would be able to actually deploy such a mechanism.
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MAGAover9000 - Tuesday, April 7, 2020 - link
I have the s10+. Fantastic device. Very happyid4andrei - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
No need for me to praise this review any longer. Still, I must nitpick. The 3dmark GPU test always has caveats in your reviews. Drop it if you feel it is detected by OEMs or it's a false GPU test like the physics one.On web tests. I read on wiki that JetStream is an Apple made test, literally. Wouldn't you say that's a big caveat when testing against ios? Similarly Speedometer is developed by the webkit team at Apple. With Android webview based on Blink, not webkit, wouldn't Android smartphones be at a disadvantage against iphones? I don't see Kraken(Firefox) or Octane(Google) being used.
Kraken would actually be neutral to both. Other 3rd party tests might be Testdrive(Microsoft) or Basemark.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I don't think that the fact that the WebKit team made those tests is a valid argument against using them. You can go and read the source JS yourself if you wish, and they're industry accepted benchmarks. Both Kraken and Octane are ancient and outdated and we dropped them just like we dropped SunSpider of the early days.id4andrei - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Thank you for the prompt answer.s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Thank you Andrei, again the most comprehensive and reliable set of samples anywhere!There seems to be considerable sample variation again (last time with Samsung was the main module since S9 with the variable aperture) in the UWA, S20+E and S20UE should have absolutely identical UWA performance but the S20UE seems to have far worse sagittal resolution than the S20+E, and Samsung's processing isn't that good in the first place, considering the 12MP 1.4μm could produce incredibly sharp pictures as that been the specs of the Pixels' main module for generations.
I don't regret their switch to f/1.8 because the old module that went up to f/1.5 wasn't sharp wide open, especially in the corners, but a further two stops' variation to f/3.3 could be useful for more DoF in closeups provided inserting that physical aperture into the tiny module doesn't compromise the optical design otherwise.
This time around the E seems to generally outperform the S, except in color as E doesn't seem to have proper color fidelity...almost as if chroma NR is set too high even in broad daylight, and the "hybridization" of the digital zoom, in which the E clearly uses a smaller portion from the periscope's readout than the S in the resulting merge. Speaking of the zoom, S20+ still performs slightly worse at 2x(16MP readout) than S10's native 12MP, though the difference is small and could be down to lens variation. Considering S10U's Z height, they could've easily fixed the S20U like Xiaomi, going 1/2.3" f/2 12MP with the 2x. Xiaomi used it despite a 4-1 bin, all the more reason to use it with a 9-1 bin. S20U's corner performance at 3x would also be much improved.
Regarding the comparison with the Fuji though, I suspect your unit has trouble focusing to infinity correctly, because the train and forest samples show clear superiority of the Fuji's zoom. I especially recognize that kind of slight haziness as being very responsive to dehaze and low radius sharpening in LR and would result in far more detail with extraction in post. Also, with an ILC, there's always stopping down a little for more sharpness and more DoF.
Regarding the full res modes, it's not worth storing 108MP of data with the CFA asking for a 9-1 bin, of course the 64MP would be better, without the RAW it's hard to say for sure, but the 64MP seems to be quad bayer.
s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I don't agree with your remark about the night comparison with Mate30P though, the UWA is not "UW" so it has better image quality, that's true, and the night mode of the Mate30P is far superior, that's also true, but not auto mode, nor any aspect of the telephoto as it's clearly using a crop of the main for 3x. Samsung does attempt to use the 4x for telephoto and although there's a significant issue of chroma noise, it's far sharper than Mate30P's crop, with at least twice 3 times the effective resolution in night mode. With S20U you could also crop out a single shot 3-4x of similar brightness to the Mate30P crop, but it's just a crop.As for the potential of P40P surpassing S20U, that model operates on a 9.4MP crop by default, interpolated to 12.5MP which clearly has consequences. In daylight it's often a regression compared to P30P (much less match Mate30P), and in night shots using the current firmware it has severe color issues of rendering large portions of the scene as a crimson red, so it's hard to say at this point too.
s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Oh, there's exception of the Mate30P auto mode in the last sample, but the night mode isn't constantly superior either.RealBeast - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I've been looking forward to getting one of these, not sure which yet. The fly in the ointment now is that I won't see my Mom (who gets my old S9+) until the Fall due to the whole COVID problem, not to mention less income. That will weigh heavily on sales of what is otherwise an amazing looking phone for me.29a - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
How large are the picture file sizes created by this thing?BedfordTim - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
The same size as any other 12MP camera. They will depend on content, hdr, motion and compression options but I would expect about 36MB for a raw image and 8MB for a high quality jpeg.