The Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Review, Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 is equipped with the Adreno 530 clocked at 624 MHz. In order to see how it performs, we ran it through our standard 2015 suite. In the future, we should be able to discuss how the Galaxy S7 performs in the context of our new benchmark suite as we test more devices on our new suite to determine relative performance.
At a high level, GPU performance appears to be mostly unchanged when comparing the Galaxy S7 to the Snapdragon 820 MDP. Performance in general is quite favorable assuming that the render resolution doesn't exceed 2560x1440.
Overall, the Adreno 530 is clearly one of the best GPUs you can get in a mobile device today. The Kirin 950's GPU really falls short in comparison. One could argue that turbo frequencies in a GPU don't make a lot of sense, but given that mobile gaming workloads can be quite bursty in nature and that gaming sessions tend to be quite short I would argue that having a GPU that can achieve significant levels of overdrive performance makes a lot of sense. The A9 is comparable if you consider the resolution of iOS devices, but when looking at the off-screen results the Adreno 530 pulls away. Of course, the real question now is how the Adreno 530 compares to the Exynos 8890's GPU in the international Galaxy S7, but that's a question that will have to be left for another day.
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sachouba - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Thanks for this review, it's quite good.But I don't understand why the brightness would have been lowered whereas other websites tell the contrary - and Samsung usually increases the maximum brightness on every flagship device.
Moreover, the web battery life test is not representative of actual battery life, because AMOLED displays are very disadvantaged in this test on white web pages, whereas the battery life would be much higher on websites with a lot of dark areas (photos, dark background, etc.).
Some browsers allow you to use a "night mode" which inverts the colors of websites background if the APL is high.
I hope you will review the Exynos version as well - I guess it will be much smoother and with a better battery life, as always.
JoshHo - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
Our new web test has some pages with dark themes currently. However, the overwhelming majority of webpages and UI have a high average picture level. In order to reflect this the vast majority of our webpages are black text on a white background.We are hoping to get an Exynos unit to compare with the Snapdragon 820.
lilmoe - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
Please use the stock browser with Ad block enabled for that test on the Exynos variant. Thanks.deskjob - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
I am totally for prioritizing energy efficiency and battery life over a 100% fluid UI. But I also find it hard to believe that at this stage in the smartphone evolution, a flagship device still can't achieve that goal without adverse effect on battery life. I feel like in the S7's case, it's more likely than not that Samsung and their proprietary UI is at fault for the janky UI performance. Would love it if you guys have time to investigate this further! After all, I am not sure I am not alone in saying a smooth UI is a big part of the everyday smartphone experience.heartinpiece - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Wow Finally!Will you be reviewing the Exynos 8990 as well?
Seems like a comparison between the 820 and the 8990 would be interesting!
10basetom - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
I can't wait for a detailed comparison between the Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 once you have both S7 models in hand.SydneyBlue120d - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
Same old question, maybe in part 2 of the review we can get an answer: Is unlimited HEVC encoding at 2160p60 with both HDR and IOS supported? Thanks a lot.Osamede - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
While its always interesting to see proper deep dive reviews, I find that these days there is nothing that would get me to buy another Samsung "flagship". Totally overpriced by strategically riding the slipstream of Apple's own boundless greed - except these ones do not hold value at all.s.yu - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
You must be blind, choosing the recent iCrap over this. Apple's last good looking phone was the 5th generation.pjcamp - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
You say people will find the stock Android interface "rather spartan." That strikes me as odd since I went from TouchWiz to an essentially stock Android on a Moto X Pure. I would never go back. Settings are located where they should be, not moved around at random. Customization is much easier. And stability is no longer an issue. I had, for instance, one major audiobook app that reliably crashed the system under TouchWiz to the point of needing a battery removal to get it restarted. I came to understand that TouchWiz, not the app, was the point of failure during the brief time I used Cyanogenmod and it worked fine. Also works fine on my Motorola.TouchWiz and other skins are not about operability. They are exercises in branding, equivalent to logos. Rather than being nonspartan, they are actually an impediment to usability. If you go to Google to find out how to do something, the instructions will be different from how your skinned phone operates. Sometimes it is easy to translate, sometimes not.
For a lot of people, that probably doesn't matter. But for a lot of people, introducing a skin introduces another potential point of failure, and another opportunity for vendors to point at each other in a circle should there ever be a problem.