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Snapdragon 865 Benchmarked: Good for Graphics, Blah for Browsing – PCMag.com


The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 offers significant boosts in graphics and AI computation, but improved CPU benchmark results aren’t translating into actual application speedups, according to the first benchmarks we ran on Snapdragon 865 reference devices at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit.

The Snapdragon 865 will be the chipset in all of the leading Android phones in the US next year, most notably the Samsung Galaxy S11. At the Snapdragon Tech Summit, we heard about hot new features that the chipset will enable: 200MP cameras, 8K recording, and live language translation, for example. Many of the new features appeared to be graphics-, camera-, or AI-based, leaving questions about the 865’s core Kryo 585 CPU open.

Well, I guess now we know why.

We ran preloaded versions of these benchmarks on a reference phone with a 2,880-by-1,440 screen, 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 128GB of storage. We compared the Snapdragon 865 with a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ running Android 9 on a Snapdragon 855; a Google Pixel 4 running Android 10 on a Snapdragon 855; a OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren running Android 10 on a clocked-up Snapdragon 855+; and an iPhone 11 Pro with Apple’s A13 chip.

These benchmarks are going to be highly controversial because, if you want to show an advantage over the 855, you have to put the 865 in “performance mode.” Performance mode ramps clocks up faster and migrates from little to big cores faster, resulting in higher benchmark scores. It doesn’t overclock the phone, but it does hit battery life.

I did my benchmarks without performance mode, but I also looked at a few results in performance mode, and those came out about 20 percent better. The open question is whether performance mode properly represents what consumers will be getting. Qualcomm says OEMs can “choose to tune for performance versus battery,” meaning my benchmarks may actually say little about real-life device performance. Battery life is a top concern for smartphone buyers, according to a survey we did, so I think benchmarking in battery-friendly mode is the way to go.

Relatively late in our testing game, Qualcomm came back to me with some responses about our results. “Testing in performance mode is ideal to show the max capabilities of the platform,” the company said. Mostly, to me at least, it showed that the latitude Android OEMs have when designing devices is great enough that these early benchmarks aren’t going to tell us a lot.

Who’s Competing?

In the US, Qualcomm’s high-end processors really only compete against Qualcomm’s last-generation high-end processors. Our market is pretty evenly split between Qualcomm and Apple, and Apple uses its own A13 processors in its phones and no others.

Abroad or at the low end, there’s a lot more competition. Samsung’s Exynos and Huawei’s Kirin chipset lineups have strong positions in those companies’ Android phones, and you see more phones with mid-to-high-end Mediatek processors as well. In low-end phones, Qualcomm competes vigorously with MediaTek and Unisoc.

These benchmarks tend to provide a lot of bragging rights to either Android or iPhone fans who want to proclaim their devices “better” in some measurable way. In terms of actual consumer recommendations, they give you a few things to look for. Will it be worth buying a Snapdragon 865 phone over last year’s less-expensive model, if all you need to do is web browsing? The answer seems to be no. Will it be worth springing for an 865 if you want to push high frame rates in gaming or video? We’re thinking yes.

First, the Good News

Qualcomm has been telling us for years that it’s been making the base CPU in its Snapdragon chipsets less important, in favor of all the other blocksGPU, DSP, modem, image signal processor, sensor hub, and the rest. This is, in general, a good tactic when you’re trying to extend battery life; have a lot of little dedicated areas that you light up when you need them, as opposed to a big, hot CPU you use for everything.

In terms of pure GPU performance, the Adreno 650 GPU does quite well. On the GFXBench Car Chase Offscreen benchmark, it doubles the frame rates we got from Snapdragon 855-based devices and did better than the latest iPhones, as well. This ties into Qualcomm’s focus on improving high-resolution, high-frame-rate display performance. Snapdragon 865-based devices will have more 90Hz and 120Hz displays, Qualcomm told us at its Snapdragon Tech Summit, demanding more from the phones’ GPUs.

Snapdragon 865 GFXBench

The new Hexagon 698 also doubles AI performance, according to the Ludashi AiMark benchmark. The AI benchmark mostly tests image recognition and classification, which bodes well for taking quick, high-quality photos. I ran this one on a smaller set of phones because the benchmark was misbehaving under Android 10. The Snapdragon 865 torches the A13 here.

Qualcomm 865 AIMark

Qualcomm promises the Kryo 585 CPU has 25 percent better performance than the CPU in the Snapdragon 855. On Geekbench benchmarks, even without performance mode turned on, the Snapdragon 865 delivers. The raw CPU performance isn’t up to the level of Apple’s A13, or even its A12, but it’s a noticeable bump.

Snapdragon 865 Geekbench

Now Some Bad News

The advances in raw computation benchmarks do not translate to application and web benchmarks. The 865’s relatively flat scores on PCMark versus the 855 really worry me, because they show that the combination of Android and the Snapdragon 865 is not getting the job done in applications.

That problem carried over most of PCMark’s subscores. I think there was something wrong, or un-optimized, about the web browser on the reference device; it scored noticeably lower than the 855-based phones we’ve used on PCMark’s web browsing test, and it didn’t show any advantage over Chrome on 855-based phones on the Jetstream Javascript test. Qualcomm said that the Jetstream result may have been because of a poor Wi-Fi network at our testing location.

Snapdragon 865 Jetstream

The 865-based device also fell down on other PCMark subtests, such as video editing and data manipulation; it showed a better score on photo editing, which may have used the GPU and AI processor more than the other subtests.

Qualcomm 865 PCMark Scores

Apple’s real strength isn’t just its chipsetit’s that it develops its chipset and OS together, so hardware and software improvements support each other. The issue with PCMark scores appears to be that Android 10 in the QRD isn’t taking advantage of the better raw performance we’re seeing from the 865.

According to Qualcomm, OEMs did additional tuning to optimize their PCMark scores, which in Qualcomm’s view could have been better represented by Performance Mode (that 20 percent uplift.)

I’m looking forward to seeing how Qualcomm and phone makers approach this issue. We need to see and hear more about how Snapdragon 865-based phones will perform on day-to-day, CPU-heavy tasks on actual retail devices with manufacturers’ performance optimizations.



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