The iPhone 6 Review
by Joshua Ho, Brandon Chester, Chris Heinonen & Ryan Smith on September 30, 2014 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 6
GPU Performance
While we don't quite have real games to benchmark against, we do have benchmarks that are reasonably good approximations of games, which heavily stress the GPU. For the most part, this means that we can see the performance of the A8's PowerVR GX6450 GPU but there are some aspects that are CPU-bound, which we'll discuss after the results.
Edit: Before I get into the results, I must caution that Basemark X will have inaccurate on-screen results as the benchmark was made using XCode 5.x in order to keep scores comparable between versions 1.1 and 1.1.1. This doesn't affect the overall score, which is solely calculated based upon off-screen performance.
For the most part, we see that the GX6450 is at about the same level as Qualcomm's Adreno 420, which seems to track closely to expectations given that the A7's GPU was around the same performance as the Adreno 330. The 3DMark test does have an interesting result, but it seems that this is because 3DMark's physics test has a strong amount of data dependency that restricts the level of out of order execution that can be done. NVIDIA's Tegra K1 is the current leader in graphics performance, but of course it's also in a tablet instead of a smartphone so it's not a direct competitor.
NAND Performance
As we move towards the goal of seamless performance in everyday tasks, one significant factor is IO performance. While there's definitely a minimum level of performance that allows for generally acceptable smoothness, there's value in having higher storage performance (e.g. prevent bottlenecking in situations such as updating apps in the background). In order to test this, we use Androbench with some custom settings on Android and a custom utility developed by Eric Patno for iOS, who has been quite helpful with furthering our efforts to test storage performance.
As this is the first time that we've looked into NAND performance on iOS devices, it's definitely worth scrutinizing the data a bit more closely than in most cases. There are a few notable cases here, which are the class-leading speeds for sequential reads and writes on the iPhone 6, but also the rather middling random read and write speeds for the iPhone 6 and 5s. The oddest result is definitely the iPhone 5, which is Ryan's personal unit and while the random read speeds are on the low side, random write speeds are easily record-setting.
In practice, with tablets and smartphones being less multitasking heavy than PCs/laptops, the sequential scores are probably slightly more relevant to the overall user experience. The iPhone 6 results show a significant increase in performance over the iPhone 5s in all of the tests, which is always good to see.
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blackcrayon - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
There's also a big difference (heh) between being able to discern a difference, or caring about the difference. I certainly care about the difference between an iPad 2 screen and an iPad 3 and up screen. But I care *far* less about a 326 ppi screen vs a 400 ppi one. The other aspects of the display at that point are more "careworthy" (viewing angles, color, contrast, etc).techconc - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Assuming 20/20 vision, 326ppi is "retina" quality at a distance of 10.5" or greater. 400ppi brings that in to 8.5" or greater. This can be mathematically proven. For you to claim to be able to discern the difference, you either have vision that is greater than 20/20 or you hold your phone much closer than everyone else in normal use. I'm guessing that neither is true and that you're more concerned about the values listed on a spec sheet.Revdarian - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
You know prior to disregarding his claims you should investigate human eyesight further, i present to you the phenomenom of Hyper Acuity, which is simply that our brains actually do notice certain defects up to 10x smaller than our "hardware" in our eyes suggests that we should be able to notice.techconc - Monday, October 6, 2014 - link
@Revdarian - Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of Hyper Acuity. However, if the argument comes down to "I think there's a difference between these two displays, but I can't really say what it is..." then I think it's also safe to suggest that any such differences simply don't matter. From a practical perspective, today's high end screens (including the iPhone 6 and 6+) have reached the point where any further "improvement" in resolution adds little or no value for normal viewing distances. That said, there are still improvements to be made in terms of color accuracy, brightness, contrast, etc. which are far more noticeable. As such, it's probably not a coincidence that these are the type of improvements that Apple has targeted with their latest displays.Kidster3001 - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
I agree. I am ready for an Android upgrade but all the top models have stupid mega resolution. I don't want to pay for it because it provides no benefit. Can't see it, eats more battery.bernstein - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
at least you got one thing right: apple is after the polish not features (with consumers willing to pay huge money for that)mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
And I wish there were more manufactures who would take this approach. It's a lonely, if extremely lucrative, market for Apple.dmacfour - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
After using an Android for 2 years, I came to the realization that polish, fit and finish, and UI fluidity are important to me.Zakster - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
You need weed !mrubin63 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Dude, please consider not skipping your meds!! I hope Apple sues you into the 20th Century. You are so clueless to be not just bizarre, but a bit unhinged mentally.