Adreno-powered Nexus 6, Galaxy Note 4 deliver poor graphics performance vs. iPhone 6 Plus

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Comments

  • Reply 121 of 151
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    gtr wrote: »
    Oh, GREAT job, Daniel! <span style="line-height:1.4em;">SUPERB job!</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">I'm giving you a standing ovation here.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">?Anytime you get these fools</span>
     (and it's always the same old usernames, isn't it?) <span style="line-height:1.4em;">raging and frothing and spraying spittle like they have here you know that you've performed admirably!</span>


    And they have the gall to mention hatred and bitterness! <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Look at the content of those posts:</span>



    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">SirLance99 has posted the funniest of pictures that would be better applied to the regular drivel that this group spits out on a regular basis, dasanman69 pretends to</span>
    abhor<span style="line-height:1.4em;"> seeing such bitterness</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;"> in between gulping down his own bitter brew, Lord Amhran is having a hissy fit AGAIN (it appears the first fifty times weren't enough) because he believes you're attempting to mislead by not always using your real name (all while he continues to call himself LORD),</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;"> Wakefinance's posts, as usual, are as boring as reading the financials, and</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Silver Shadow is too happy to find that he has friends just as silly as he is to even attack you properly!</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">You almost even got Gatorguy to drop his snivelling, Wormtongue-like facade and come right out and make a proper point like most normal people do. If that isn't an achievement then I don't know what is.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Well done, Daniel.</span>


    As long as you continue to write such enjoyable, informative articles - that also include a fireworks show at the end - I will continue to read them, relish them, roll on the floor laughing over them, and recommend them to all I know.

    Keep up the great work!

    Defending an insecure, irrelevant, and bitter bully speaks volumes about you. The constant need to belittle the competition shows me that he has zero confidence, and can only feel better by attacking others. I've never seen Gruber, Rene Ritchie, or the other Apple advocates lower themselves to such childish tactics. When someone says the same thing over, and over they're no longer trying to convince others, they’re trying to convince themselves.
  • Reply 122 of 151
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    dasanman69 wrote: »
    Defending an insecure, irrelevant, and bitter bully speaks volumes about you. The constant need to belittle the competition shows me that he has zero confidence, and can only feel better by attacking others. I've never seen Gruber, Rene Ritchie, or the other Apple advocates lower themselves to such childish tactics. When someone says the same thing over, and over they're no longer trying to convince others, they’re trying to convince themselves.

    If you'd do as I do and try to avoid responding to trollish posts some of the ones that rely on it may find it's not as much fun and do so less often. AI would be better off for it.
  • Reply 123 of 151
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by nht View Post

     

     

    Android 5 is nicely faster with ART over Dalvik.  So the current benchmarks under Android 4 are not that useful in judging the Nexus 6 performance which ships with 5.


     

    It makes a pretty huge difference. When I first got my Nexus 4, it was super responsive, but as the Android versions kept ticking on, it started to get a little sluggish. Then I switched it from Dalvik to ART, and I think it's faster than it was when new. Switching between apps is amazingly fast, and all of the apps just respond instantly. I need to remember to temper my comments a bit, because I know that most Android, and even most Nexus users aren't running ART yet, but it's going to make a huge difference.

  • Reply 124 of 151
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    gatorguy wrote: »
    If you'd do as I do and try to avoid responding to trollish posts some of the ones that rely on it may find it's not as much fun and do so less often. AI would be better off for it.

    I responded because [@]GTR[/@] is usually a positive contributor to the forum, and one of the regulars I have respect for. I do however appreciate your advice, and will practice self-restraint in the future.
  • Reply 125 of 151
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee View Post

     

     

    Sigh. I have Apps that will utilize 100% CPU power on an A7/A8, so your statement that there are no Apps that can slow down a device with the A7/* is pure BS.


    What sort of applications do you use that frequently max out the phone's CPU? Would any of them give a better experience on a full-blown desktop? I like my mobile devices (including my laptop) to run cool and quiet above everything else (including performance) since heat is a mobile device's worst enemy, and your battery won't last long on any device if you are maxing out the CPU. I used to have a MBP that packed quad cores and discrete graphics, but having been burned by the GPU failures I'll probably opt for integrated graphics and ULV CPUs in any future laptop. Any tasks that require sustained high performance, such as numerical simulations, gaming, or compiling lots of code, are better handled by a desktop with ample cooling.

  • Reply 125 of 151
    gtr wrote: »
    Oh, GREAT job, Daniel! <span style="line-height:1.4em;">SUPERB job!</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">I'm giving you a standing ovation here.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">?Anytime you get these fools</span>
     (and it's always the same old usernames, isn't it?) <span style="line-height:1.4em;">raging and frothing and spraying spittle like they have here you know that you've performed admirably!</span>


    And they have the gall to mention hatred and bitterness! <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Look at the content of those posts:</span>



    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">SirLance99 has posted the funniest of pictures that would be better applied to the regular drivel that this group spits out on a regular basis, dasanman69 pretends to</span>
    abhor<span style="line-height:1.4em;"> seeing such bitterness</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;"> in between gulping down his own bitter brew, Lord Amhran is having a hissy fit AGAIN (it appears the first fifty times weren't enough) because he believes you're attempting to mislead by not always using your real name (all while he continues to call himself LORD),</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;"> Wakefinance's posts, as usual, are as boring as reading the financials, and</span>
    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Silver Shadow is too happy to find that he has friends just as silly as he is to even attack you properly!</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">You almost even got Gatorguy to drop his snivelling, Wormtongue-like facade and come right out and make a proper point like most normal people do. If that isn't an achievement then I don't know what is.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Well done, Daniel.</span>


    As long as you continue to write such enjoyable, informative articles - that also include a fireworks show at the end - I will continue to read them, relish them, roll on the floor laughing over them, and recommend them to all I know.

    Keep up the great work!

    Could it also be GTR == DED ?
    Evidence is mounting!
  • Reply 127 of 151
    chipsychipsy Posts: 287member
    So basically the performance of both is pretty much the same with Snapdragons even outperforming in some off-screen tests. But because the Note 4 and other Android phones have a higher resolution it performs less on-screen than the A8. Shocker! It's not like the chip is actually much better or anything, it's purely the resolution. I bet if Apple was the one with the higher resolution DED would use that as the excuse.
    But who cares anyway, it's not like there are actually games out there that work these chips to the limit.
  • Reply 128 of 151
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by patpatpat View Post





    Could it also be GTR == DED ?

    Evidence is mounting!

     

    Isn't there a forum rule about not having sock puppets? Forums I've moderated had tools to research IPs of posters when a sock was suspected, and then we'd ban them all when detected.

  • Reply 129 of 151
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    patpatpat wrote: »
    Could it also be GTR == DED ?
    Evidence is mounting!

    I don’t think so.
  • Reply 130 of 151
    chipsychipsy Posts: 287member
    patpatpat wrote: »
    Could it also be GTR == DED ?
    Evidence is mounting!

    Don't know about that but like pretty much everyone knows Corrections = DED.
  • Reply 131 of 151

    Just some random thoughts in my head from that article and others like it:

     

    1. After a certain point, higher pixel density is useless.  While the jump to the retina screen was noticeable, I have yet to see a screen upwards in pixel density from there that has swayed my opinion of how a screen looked.  All the of the factors I care about now concerning visuals deals with contrast, color accuracy, and brightness, things that the GPU/CPU have no effect on.

     

    Only a truly demented individual or company would think that watching 4K video on a phone is worth it.  Anything more than 1080p @ 330dpi is just marketing so they can extract an extra $50 from your wallet, whether the maker is Apple or not.  At 18-20" away I doubt there is more than a handful of eagle-eyed people in a room of 1000 that could tell the difference between 720p and 1080p of the same video on the same phone.  

     

    I've seen a few 4K TV's, the true benefit I saw was in color, contrast, and brightness not in the extra pixels.  The Best Buy I was in had the higher end 1080p screens more than a few steps away from their 4K set so you couldn't directly compare.  The only 1080p sets nearby the 4K ones were midrange models.  To me, 4K would matter on a 80"+ screen, but on smaller screens its just a gimmick to get you to buy a new TV...  just like "3D" was and just like >1080p on a phone is.

     

    2. All of the games I've dared to play that make extensive use of the 3D capabilities in my phone, seem to be pretty boring games to me.  I must admit though, I don't purchase games that are more than $2.99 (overly expensive games are why I quit buying consoles).  I see the mobile game landscape as: some really great games that barely tax the graphical ability of my phone, some weak games that seem to push "art" more than content or gameplay, and a rare few that have both.

     

    I tend to avoid 3D mobile games most of the time because battery life is more important than trying to be immersed in "glamorous 3D artwork" on a screen so pitifully small.  Yes, despite what you read, a 6" screen is still pitifully small for 3D gaming, especially considering you are losing 20% of the screen space to operate the controls on the screen usually.

     

    3. I really dislike that Android phones are having such a hard time keeping up or beating Apple (choice of resolution being the cause or not).  It just means that Apple can make smaller improvements and get away with it.  Yes, I feel that Apple drags its' feet sometimes because the competition isn't there.  Yes it is just crap that bean counters do though, no matter the company.   But Apple comes in swinging its "different" approach yet does the same old run-walk-walk-walk-run-walk-walk stuff that every other company does while saying "they are doing the best".

     

    4. I had an android phone and a kindle fire (before the iPhone was on verizon).  Despite the "ROM scene" doing their best I still hated Android compared to my iPod touch.  The Android (and it's community - from developers to rom'ers to Google themselves) to me felt like it was run by and contained a bunch of people with ADHD.  As soon as the "next big phone" came along you had 3-6 months before the people working behind the phone you just bought got their new phone and all good progress on your current (and now obsolete) phone just died.  Most of the time they bought that new phone with donations from people who appreciated their independent work on the phone they just jumped off of.

     

    So you had two choices if you didn't go to Apple:  1. You pay $600-$900 a year to keep a decent Android phone in your pocket that still gets updates and can run everything in the app store.  2. You "quietly suffer" with an Android phone that seems to get slower and slower doing the same tasks each month.

     

    At least with Apple, "best specs" or not, you CAN make it to the end of your contract with a phone that is still currently getting updates.

  • Reply 132 of 151
    nhtnht Posts: 4,522member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Neo42 View Post

    Not expecting the difference to be extreme, but I'd be surprised if there were not some marginal performance differences between the Note 4 and Nexus 6.

     

    10%ish+ based on ART by itself.  Maybe a little more since that 10% number is based on earlier builds and Google has been refining it.  They claim up to 50% or something similar.  For some use cases you could see a marked improvement.  Android 5 also added OpenGL ES 3.1 and AEP support.

     

    Given that Qualcomm's OGL 3.1ES drivers have been borked you could see some decent improvements if Google has fixed any for Nexus.

  • Reply 133 of 151
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    The initial Geekbench score is in for the Nexus 9 for anyone interested since apparently it now matters more than it once did.
  • Reply 134 of 151

    Daniel,

     

    Lets open more that eight apps, then multi-task, you on a Iphone 6 and me on an LG G3. You go ahead a write an entire article on how benchmarks on iPone are best then the Android flagship phones, yet the pixelation on Safari crolling on IOS has always been there. Why does apple not allow free scrolling on Safari for larger webpages? Their RAM implementation is so ignorant.

     

    Also, give me a break, the system shafts users as the wonderful performance can only really benefit gamers. How about real world scenarios where I have to switch my phone dialer to floating windows and open a note app to input a number or message the caller is relaying? Sure apple has benchmark kuddos, but how good is that if features are lacking?

     

    You are saying Apple innovates because their new 6 has rounded edges and bigger screen? Pathetic, look at the different flagship version and the features added from one to another, some have huge leaps in added benefits. Apple will always be the same, always.

  • Reply 135 of 151
    neo42neo42 Posts: 287member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Gatorguy View Post



    The initial Geekbench score is in for the Nexus 9 for anyone interested since apparently it now matters more than it once did.


     

    Not bad.  Hopefully nvidia has kept the heat down and full load doesn't melt the N9 :)

  • Reply 136 of 151

    Whoa. Nice.

  • Reply 137 of 151
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gatorguy View Post



    The initial Geekbench score is in for the Nexus 9 for anyone interested since apparently it now matters more than it once did.


    Pretty high bar for the A8X to compete against. And it is on 32bit Geekbench.

  • Reply 138 of 151
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacBook Pro View Post





    The entire point of the article is that high performance off-screen doesn't necessarily equate to high performance on-screen e.g. real world performance.

     

    And you do know that games can have different internal rendering resolutions than the panel resolution, right? The iPad 3 ran many of its games at non-native for example.   Therefore a game running with any certain internal rendering resolution on both would not be "poor" on the GN4 in comparison, maybe slightly behind. I know this is an Apple site, but the article reeks of blind fanboyism.   

     

     

     

    And to the earlier comment about having less subpixels, to that person do you know games simply calculate pixel colors, and subpixel coloring is filled in by display controllers? 1080P would have the same GPU load whether on pentile or RGB.  

     

    When an Android phone edges out the 6 a bit in graphics, I can't wait for the article calling the iPhone 6s performance "poor". Yeesh, some authors.

  • Reply 139 of 151
    froodfrood Posts: 771member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Corrections View Post

    Originally Posted by Frood View Post



    After a dissertation of hardware this, processor that, ram, android blah blah... In the end it looks like DED recognizes the real distinguishment in performance is that the Note 4 is driving roughly double the pixels the iPhone 6 plus is.


    In the end? As in, not throughout the entire article? Did you not even glance at the photos?


    I agree its fair to test the phones as delivered, but why beat around the bush with all the hardware rant instead of just saying the iPhone 6 plus runs graphics intensive apps faster because it is doing about half the work the Note 4 is.



    You can speed up a computer considerably by lowering the graphics settings, with the tradeoff being you eventually get images looking like Minecraft.


    Do you think iPhone 6 looks like Minecraft? Can you see a difference between 2MP and 3.8MP on a 5" device? Do you think it is a good idea for an anemic Application Processor to be driving a mobile screen with nearly the resolution of a Retina Display MacBook Pro?


    When you are doing things other than playing graphics intensive games, you'll be treated to higher density, sharper images than the iPhone is capable of. Personally I'd rather have the speed or, better yet, have Samsung or Apple innovate the capability to change graphics resolutions into their phones.


    Do you understand what happens when you "innovate the capability to change graphics resolutions"? 


     

    Changing resolutions?  Absolutely I understand.  I did not say it was without challenges.  But the company that overcomes those would give users the ability to decide what speed vs graphics resolution works best for them.   Apple would have a tougher time overcoming the challenges because they are set to fixed displays (which has given their developers a helluva easier time- there's a tradeoff for everything).

     

    Is it your argument that Apple makes poor design decisions because clearly their hardware is not up to snuff on the iPhone 6 plus, they chose to put in a higher resolution screen before their hardware was capable of driving it correctly?  Clearly it is notably slower than the 5s so it is a failure in your view, right?  Of course (or at least I'm hoping) the answer to that is 'no.'  Apple traded some performance to provide a better screen.   Samsung traded even more performance to provide an even better screen again.  I agree with you for my personal use, I'd prefer if the Note had gone with the lower resolution of the iPhone 6 plus to gain gaming performance- but to the people that spend a lot of time with photos or browsing, a sharper screen could well be the better choice, and phones are fast enough that most games play flawlessly on either ( I don't think they've ported hi-res Crysis to phones yet).

     

    I'll hold off judgement until I can compare both side by side, but the few side by side reviews out there do state the Samsung screen is noticeably better, but that you would *only* notice it when actually holding the phones next to each other.  I haven't seen a Note 4 but I did check out the 6 plus and think its screen is gorgeous.

  • Reply 140 of 151
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Corrections View Post

     

     

    I don't cower behind an anonymous identity, mr lord raging hypocrite. 




    Says the guy who writes under three different aliases.

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