The HTC One X for AT&T Review
by Brian Klug on May 1, 2012 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- HTC
- Qualcomm
- MSM8960
- Krait
- Mobile
- Tegra 3
- HTC One
- NVIDIA
The One X has a 4.7“ 1280x720 display that’s beautiful, dubbed the ”infinity screen.“ In fact, that’s really all you need to know about it - it’s absolutely wonderful, and honestly if you’re concerned with mobile displays just stop right there. At above 4.5” diagonal, 720p seems to be the new norm, and the combination of that 4.7" diagonal size and 720p on the HTC One X results in a PPI of 312. HTC shipped a device with an LCD display last year whose pixel density exceeded the iPhone 4/4S Retina Display for the first time in the HTC Rezound, which was 341 PPI.
Nevertheless the HTC One X still has subpixels small enough that I can’t visually distinguish them at all but from the most extreme distances. In addition, because it’s LCD you get an RGB stripe as opposed to PenTile RGBG like what currently ships on Samsung’s SAMOLED HD displays at 720p in the Galaxy Nexus.
I did some poking around, and my HTC One X (AT&T) review unit has a Sony display:
[DISP] mipi_video_sony_hd720p_init: assign initial setting for SONY_NT id 0x18103 Cut1, PANEL type = PANEL_ID_ELITE_SONY_NT
The panel goes extremely bright, at over 500 nits maximum, and has top of the chart contrast. As always I characterized the One X display using a combination of ColorHCFR and an i1D2 and Francois’ excellent Voodoo Screen Test Pattern generator application.
I’ve made both the color.chc file and measures available. The CIE diagram shows that HTC’s Infinity Display has very close to sRGB coverage, however color temperature is on the red side at just under 6000K. That’s really my only gripe, and curiously enough the One S with SAMOLED qHD displays are closer to 6500K than the LCD packing HTC One Xes.
Viewing angles look good on the HTC One X, there's no visible color shift at extreme angles. Outdoor viewing is also pretty good on the HTC One X, thanks in part to optical bonding between the display glass and LCD itself. One fewer air gap means fewer Fresnel reflections which quickly turn a display into a mess outdoors.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
137 Comments
View All Comments
MrMilli - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
"On the GPU side, there's likely an NVIDIA advantage there as well."How do you get to this conclusion?
Qualcomm scores a little bit higher in Egypt as in the Pro test of GLBenchmark. I don't know why you would put any importance to the off-screen tests for these two devices since they both run the same resolution (which is even 720p) which takes me to my next points. Actual games will be v-synced and how does the Tegra suddenly become faster than the Adreno even though they both are still rendering at the same resolution as on-screen but just with v-sync off. I've always had a hard time accepting the off-screen results of GLBenchmark because there's no way to verify if a device is actually rendering correctly (or maybe even cheating). Can you imagine testing a new videocard in the same fashion?
metafor - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
Results can vary with v-sync because Tegra could be bursting to higher fps values. The offscreen isn't a perfect test either but it gives you an idea of what would happen if a heavier game that didn't approach the 60fps limit would be like.Of course, those games likely won't have the same workloads as GLBenchmark, so it really wouldn't matter all that much.
ChronoReverse - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
The offscreen test is worthless really.If at 720p, the same benchmark, except it puts an image on the screen, shows that the S4 GPU is faster than the Tegra3 GPU, then how useless is the offscreen test showing the opposite?
Furthermore, neither the S4 nor Tegra3 comes close to 59-60FPS, both tipping at around the 50FPS range.
It's pretty clear that by skipping the rendering, the offscreen test is extremely unrealistic.
metafor - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
It doesn't need to come close. It just needs to burst higher than 60fps. Let's say that it would normally reach 80fps 10% of the time and remain 40fps the other 90%. Let's say S4 were to only peak to 70fps 10% of the time but remained at 45fps the other 905. The S4's average would be higher with v-sync while Tegra's would be higher without v-sync.The point of the benchmark isn't how well the phone renders the benchmark -- after all, nobody's going to play GLBenchmark :)
The point is to show relative rendering speed such that when heavier games that don't get anywhere close to 60fps are being played, you won't notice stutters.
Of course, as I mentioned, heavier games may have a different mix of shaders. As Basemark shows, Adreno is very very good at complex shaders due to its disproportional ALU strength.
Its compiler unfortunately is unable to translate this into simple shader performance.
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
That's still wrong. If you spike a lot, then your experience is worse for 3D games. It's not like we don't know that minimum framerate is just as important.As you mentioned stutters, a device that dips to 40FPS would be more stuttery than one that dips only to 45FPS.
metafor - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that v-sync'ed results will vary even if it's not close to 60fps. Because some scenes will require very little rendering (say, a panning shot of the sky) and some scenes will require a lot of heavy rendering (say, multiple characters sword fighting, like in Egypt).The average fps may be well below 60fps. But peak fps may be a lot higher. In such cases, the GPU that peaks higher (or more often) will seem worse than it is.
Now, an argument can be made that a GPU that also has very low minimum framerates is worse. But we don't know the distribution here.
Chloiber - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
Well the benchmark doesn't measure your experience in 3D games but the fps.snoozemode - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
The ATRIX has a LCD pentile RGBW display, as well as the HTC one S, so LCD is definitely not a guarantee for RGB. Maybe you should correct the article with that.snoozemode - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
Sorry one s is obviously amoled.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
It's also the passable RGBG pentile, not the viled RGBW pentile.