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Iphone Graphics IOS

New Benchmark Shows iPhones Throttle So Hard They Lose Their Edge Over Android (hothardware.com) 133

MojoKid writes: Apple has repeatedly asserted its dominance in terms of performance versus competitive mobile platforms. And it has been historically true that, in cross-platform benchmarks, iPhones generally can beat out Android phones in both CPU and GPU (graphics) performance. However, a new benchmark recently released from trusted benchmark suite developer UL Benchmarks sheds light on what could be the iPhone's Achilles' Heel in terms of performance, or more specifically, performance over extended duration.

The new benchmark, 3DMark WildLife, employs Apple's Metal API for rendering and Vulkan on Android devices. In testing at HotHardware, for basic single-run tests, again iPhones trounce anything Android, including flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, ASUS ROG Phone 3 and OnePlus 8. However, in the extended duration WildLife Stress Test, which loops the single test over and over for 20 minutes, the current flagship iPhone 11 Pro and A13 Bionic's performance craters essentially to Snapdragon 865/865+ performance levels, while Android phones like the OnePlus 8 maintain 99+% of their performance. Though this is just one gaming benchmark test that employs the latest graphics technologies and APIs, it's interesting to see that perhaps Apple's focus on tuning for quick bursty workloads (and maybe benchmark optimization too?) falls flat if the current class of top-end iPhone is pushed continuously.

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New Benchmark Shows iPhones Throttle So Hard They Lose Their Edge Over Android

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  • What edge? (Score:5, Funny)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @05:07AM (#60618082)

    iPhones are so restrictive, that the only thing they do efficiently is bilk you for money through microtransactions, and keep you inside a walled garden economy.

    If you want to do basically anything "Smart" with the smart phone, you have to stick with programs designed with the above model in mind, and pay 5$+ for every bit of arbitrary software. You can completely forget about doing anything actually cool or interesting with the technology, because the hood is both figuratively and literally bolted down to prevent your access.

    Android on the other hand, is so open that the notion of security is a farce.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FudRucker ( 866063 )
      i have to agree, i could not even upload my own ringtone to my iphone, i even re-encoded a 2 second mp3 file to the file format that iphones use for ringtons and it still would not allow me to use it despite emailing the file to my phone because iphones wont allow me to use a thumbdrive or bluetooth for file transfer, iphones are fairly decent hardware but the software is so restrictive that i wont buy another iphone, when the iphone i have now becomes unusable i will toss it and stick to android,
      • Re:What edge? (Score:5, Informative)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @06:20AM (#60618174)

        i have to agree, i could not even upload my own ringtone to my iphone, i even re-encoded a 2 second mp3 file to the file format that iphones use for ringtons and it still would not allow me to use it despite emailing the file to my phone because iphones wont allow me to use a thumbdrive or bluetooth for file transfer, iphones are fairly decent hardware but the software is so restrictive that i wont buy another iphone, when the iphone i have now becomes unusable i will toss it and stick to android,

        You certainly can make and install your own ringtones on iOS - you just have to (gasp!) follow the directions.

        I can't speak to Catalina, but on all previous versions of OS X / macOS you uploaded ringtones via iTunes. I've kept some old ringtones I like, from a very old Motorola phone, which I converted and uploaded to my iPhone.

      • Your rant sounds just like the absurd ones people kept repeating about macs in Ye Olde Days.

        • That's because they don't own an iPhone and never thought that there might be a ton of apps to make your own ringtones - including GarageBand for IOS from Apple.

          All the proposed workarounds, including running iTunes in a VM, are crazy by comparison.

          Do yourself a favour - buy an IPad - you know you want one.

          • by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @11:57AM (#60619006)

            I don't know about the guy who can't easily get ringtones on--

            I do not own apple products. (I openly admit my prejudice. If other people want that crap, that is on them, but I do not like, love, nor really want anything to do with apple products. I do not approve of the direction they are trying to push computing-- which is away from the end user's control, and more toward a "Mother knows best" approach, complete with duct tape and mittens. Their products practically come with a complimentary plastic bubble.)

            That said, I have had to fix/do tech stuff/assist co-workers that own them.

            Here's a fun story:

            A co-worker needed to get a series of text messages (that were harassing/had criminal intent behind them) out of their iphone, in order to provide them to their attorney.

            I *WAS* ultimately successful. After 5 hours or work, including dredging up countless forum posts, and even trying to search fucking Reddit, looking for free tools.

            Why? Because the **ONLY** way to get the text messages out of the damn phone, is to do an iTunes whole phone backup-- THEN-- Use a BUYWARE APP, DESIGNED FOR MAC, to strip out the text messages from the whole phone backup image iTunes creates-- and I'll be mother fucking god-dammed, if I am going to set up a mac virtual machine, *AND SPEND MONEY*, on something that is doable with fucking ADB on android.

            (Seriously, I can do an ADB Pull on the text message database file, and then do whatever the fuck I want with it, with free tools, because it is just a SQL database file. Doesn't cost a dime.)

            What I wound up doing, was use the trial version of the buyware app, after finding a "We dont really recommend it, but we also have a crippled windows version" on their website, then skating around their "We only let you extract a tiny number of messages, because this is a trial!!" bullshit, and then assembling the conversation she needed for her attorney by hand.

            Every time I have needed to do anything even remotely technical to an iPhone, I have run into endless barriers of "SPEND MONEY! DO IT NAOW!", which is just plain bullshit.

            Never been happier I do not own an iPhone.

      • i think think teh problem is you are not gud at computers, but maybe when u are growned up u will be gud

      • I have always been using my own ringtones on my iPhones. If you canâ(TM)t pull that off turn in your geek card and leave this site.
  • Apple shenanigans aside, it's a shame Android was chosen by Google back in the day. No matter how fast a JVM is, it is still a JVM. The best smartphone I've ever used was the Maemo/Meego Nokia N9: it had a single core 1GHz Cortex A8, and yet it was as smooth as any iPhone, only it could also do much more because the OS (a full linux distro) was not limiting. Due to it being abandoned (long story, but a MS shill got in as Nokia's CEO and buried Maemo to switch to Windows Mobile), I had to switch to Android t

  • I don’t think 20 minutes at 100% on all cores is a “quick bursty” workload for a phone.
  • seriously

    • Seriously? Nobody. People aren't going to make a buying decision based on this article.

      It's just an excuse to Apple bash. Look at the people saying how hard it is to install a ringtone on an iPhone, because they have to set up a vim running iTunes, because they never thought to look in the App Store for an iOS app to do that right on the phone.

      Or saying it took them hours to extract some emails from someone else's iPhone when they could have either just forwarded the email or a screenshot of the email.

  • I see that 'crater' is the wanker word of the week. I mean, who wouldn't use a six-letter, two-syllable word in place of one with four-letters and one-syllable?
  • I occastionally post anonymouly for varioius reasons. Apparently all anonymous comments now "look too much like ascii art" and are impossible to post.

    • I'm getting this too, on comments that have nothing to do with ASCII art. This must be the latest Filter Of The Week.

  • Power (Score:2, Insightful)

    99.9+% of users care more about battery than 3D gaming. This leads to inherent thermal and power design trade-offs.

    iPhone people tend to do very basic tasks on their devices so one can see why an engineer would trade off 3D performance for other design goals.

    The OnePlus must have excellent cooling and is probably thicker (fact check). It's good to know that whatever sub-sub population cares about 3D gaming complexity on mobile has a go-to device and the OnePlus engineering achievement should be undersold

  • Lawyers are ordering legal pads and extra supplies of pencils for the deluge of class actions that will be filed in the next few weeks.

    If you can do. If you can't, you become a lawyer and sue Apple.

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @08:08AM (#60618348)
    The article states the iPhone throttling was due to thermal management but provides no information to support that assertion. They also don't indicate whether or not the phone was plugged in, which means the throttling might just be power management to preserve battery life.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This is also one specific benchmark. On many Android phones using the Snapdragon 865+ handing beat the iPhone even when not throttling.

    • You run a benchmark shit gets hot chips start to throttle its not that fucking hard

      • And yet there's no throttling on the Android phones, which were run just as long, so apparently it's harder than you're able to imagine.
        • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          yea shithead cause the android phones are not sold and marketed as 125% full load

          news flash ... apple lies, constantly their hyper tech nonsense cant run 20 min under full load before scaling back to 75% so its only "faster" in short bursts

          and that's been the situation ever since the PPC G5 and their ultra thin laptop's and all in ones ... its faster ... for a grand total of 5 min of full load, which is fine if you only use a "computer device" static media consumption machine

  • My iPhones have been solid over the years. Iâ(TM)m happy.

  • So, it's just a matter of software. The iPhone's speed could change with a software change,
    but Snapdragon has nowhere else to go. The benchmarkers must be so proud.

    Besides, wouldn't a more real-world test for Android be how fast it uploads all of your
    personal data to Google?

  • by agent_blue ( 413772 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @08:47AM (#60618434)

    The article only showed one test results from a oneplus8, and it showed that the slowest iphone loop was still faster than the fastest loop from the oneplus8.

    According to the article, The edges goes to iphone since even at its slowest, its faster than android, and at its fastest, its way faster than android. Would like to see more comprehensive tests though.

  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @08:51AM (#60618450)

    For a while the cheapest ($350) iPhone SE was faster than the $1000 Android flagship phones

  • arm mac pro cube will do the same? at high cost!
    With NO PCI-E slots
    With apple over priced storage
    TB with no Video cards supported
    TB with no boot hdd / ssd
    Build in GPU can't drive more then 2 screens at 8K
    Apple only ram slots

    All at an price that you can build an system with better storage, Good video cards , and not locked to mac os only

    • Maybe people want an OS based on FreeBSD, a real Unix, and not a shitty systems-infested wannabe like Linux?

      Maybe they want to run programs without futzing with Wine?

      Maybe they don't like all the shitty programs that come with Linux distros and are willing to pay good money for good software that does what they want?

      Maybe they need easy to use text to speech that just works and doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking if it works at all instead of the shit that doesn't even work any more with Linux?

      For pe

      • Mac os for any hardware will be good.

        Apple goes way to far with hard to repair systems, over priced ram / cpu / storage upgrades. And systems to thin for work use.

        Why not have an fat imac?

        Why not have have an mid mac (does need to have slots but just an mini but bigger with an fan)

        Why not have an 15' laptop that is not so thin?

  • So it took somebody to make a synergetic benchmark to point out that iPhones suck.

    Good thing I use my devices in the real world, and it tromps on Android day in and day out.

  • Call me surprised that the conversation hasn't focused on the primary aspect of the misleading nature of the title (even if someone else has already used the phrase "misleading title"):

    "So Hard They Lose Their Edge Over Android"

    I think the data shows that the tested iPhones show diminished performance, considerable, but even with that performance loss, all three models bested every other phone, even those with the newest Snap 865+, in spite of being 1-2 generations older (or, put simpler, being 6-18 months

  • As much as it pains me to say, I think this shows Apple made the right decision in the trade off of performance vs battery life. Much of the phone's UI experience is benefited from very short burst of rapid GPU performance. This gives silky smooth performance and excellent battery life. Android doesn't really come close in either smoothness or battery life. Of course Apple does pay a penalty for their obsession with being thin. When you do need performance over longer periods of time, it clearly falls d

  • the common use for a phone, is to use it in short bursts, requesting info, and then taking some time to think it over. there is no reason to have an app do calculations for 20mn straight on a phone.
    I suspect the thermal limits will be much different on the apple silicon macs, due to larger thermal mass and surface.

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