Performance: Hampered By Resolution?

It's nary storm to discovery another high-destruction smartphone powered aside Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 SoC, which, like its predecessors, has tested to be extremely popular. In the LG G3 you'll find the MSM8974AC, which is the highest-end SoC Qualcomm currently provides, clocked at astir to 2.45 GHz crossways four Krait 400 CPU cores.

Also on the Snapdragon 801's die is an Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 578 Megacycle per second, a 32-bit double-channel LPDDR3 memory controller providing 14.9 Sarin/s of bandwidth, a Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP, LTE/HSPA+/2G honeycombed radios, WI-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/Ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and IZAT Gen8B Global Positioning System+GLONASS. I've covered the SoC in greater detail in my HTC Single M8 review, so head over there if you're after more details.

The LG G3 is one of the first smartphones I've discover to have deuce SKUs with varied internal NAND capacities arsenic intimately as several amounts of RAM. The 16 GB G3 comes with 2 GB of RAM, piece the 32 GB good example I have on hand for recapitulation has 3 GB of Jampack. Generally use I'd be dumbstricken if there was significant performance difference between the two models, unless you are a heavy multi-tasker.

Also launch in the LG G3 is an NFC come off, separate to the SoC, and a microSD card expansion slot supporting adequate 128 Gigabyte cards. The microSD one-armed bandit is situated right away above the small-SIM slot in a stacked software ilk we've seen on otherwise handsets with removable rear covers.

Comparing the internals of the G3 to G2 reveals a some differences, but nothing ground-breaking; typical for a 2014 flagship release.


Specs LG G3 LG G2
SoC Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC Snapdragon 800 MSM8974
Central processor 4x Krait 400 @ 2.45 GHz 4x Krait 400 @ 2.26 GHz
GPU Adreno 330 @ 578 MHz Adreno 330 @ 450 MHz
Remembering 2 or 3 GB dual-channel
LPDDR3 @ 933 MHz		 2 Gi dual-television channel
LPDDR3 @ 800 MHz
Storage 16/32 Gi intragroup + microSD 16/32 GB internal
Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 4.0
LTE Family 4
Opposite NFC, Infrared LED, MHL, GPS, HSPA+, 2G
Display 5.5" 1440p Real-HD IPS+ LCD 5.2" 1080p True-HD IPS+ Liquid crystal display
Battery 11.4 Wh (3,000 mAh)
Tv camera 13 MP 1/3.06" sensing element with f/2.4 lens, OIS
Telecasting Upbound to 2160p/30 (4K Radical HD) In the lead to 1080p/60

As you'd anticipate, performance around the OS is dandy. Loading applications is fast, navigating the UI is smooth contempt the boost in answer, and the Snapdragon 801 is no slouch when it comes to web browsing. Occasionally the weighted LG bark would cause application and Oculus sinister screens to load slightly slower than their counterparts connected competing devices, but IT's not even up approximately existence a laggy experience.

I detected the G3 was especially agile at multi-tasking and switching between applications, faster than the Sony Xperia Z2 which also comes with 3 GB of RAM. I'd say this comes down to many LG-specific optimizations and very fast NAND, which makes pulling app data from the internal warehousing a speedy proposition.

With all flagship Android smartphone using the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, on that point's hardly a difference between them when it comes to CPU performance. The LG G2 came loaded with a Snapdragon 800 SoC, clocked slightly lower (2.3 GHz vs 2.5 GHz) crosswise its Krait 400 CPU cores, indeed information technology's not surprising to see there's only a 15% advantage to the G3.

The G3 again performs very well in Vellamo, falling into the bracket out of other Snapdragon 801 SoCs. Information technology's worth mentioning that the G3 doesn't chess in benchmarks either, ditching the foul practice since the release of the G2.

GPU benchmarks are where things start to get interesting, because the Adreno 330 has to power a 2560 x 1440 display instead of the common 1080p display used in all the different flagships.

3DMark's Silver storm Unlimited benchmark is go soured-screen, and then it's no surprisal to escort the G3 perform in the bracket of Snapdragon 800 and 801 devices. A replaceable situation ass be seen downstairs with GFXBench's offscreen benchmarks, with the G3 performing as expected.

In onscreen benchmarks, this is where we undergo the performance hit attributed to the 1440p video display. On average the G3 recorded 32% lower soma rates than a 1080p handset that also has the Adreno 330, which is really respectable considering there are 1.78x more pixels to provide to; if benchmark carrying out mapped directly to changes in resolution, we'd be expecting a 44% drop.

Still, a 32% drop could be significant when playing high-end 3D games on the G3. In the T-Rex benchmark in particular we see performance miss from 27 FPS to 20 FPS, which is the remainder between a close-playable compose rate and completely unplayable.

With that said, I tried a few best-selling titles available along the Play Memory, and I had no trouble running whatsoever of them at smooth framing rates. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas couldn't successfully run at maximum settings without being jerky, but other titles like Gameloft's Modern Combat 4 were no match for the Adreno 330.

It seems that while on paper the G3 has a disfavour, actual real-world titles aren't victimisation the full capabilities of the GPU. Obviously I can't say whether this will convert in the future, but at to the lowest degree in 2014 you're not going to see the G3 conflict.

Moving on to NAND execution, and this is where the G3 really excels. The handset outstrips its competitors away quite gross profit margin on both sequential study/write and random interpret performance, which gives information technology a cloudless edge when freight applications and data from the internal storage.

You only get USB 2.0 transfer rates with the LG G3, but nevertheless information technology performs well enough when transferring content from a PC, although read speeds are fairly low. Ideally I'd like to see USB 3.0 along entirely high-end handsets as the NAND read/write speeds are above what USB 2.0 can support, but it doesn't seem wish the market is ready to transition just yet.

Out of the box the 32 GB LG G3 has 23 GB of free space available to users, which is raft for apps and data. There's also a microSD board slot in case you need many space, supporting up to 128 U.K. cards, although As the internal NAND is much faster I'd propose using information technology most importantly.

Like most smartphones I had no perturb using any of the radio set networks in the handset. The worldwide unlocked model supports LTE Category 4 on 700, 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2300 and 2600 MHz bands, plus HSPA+ on 850, 900, 1900 and 2100 MHz, which is good for most nations but it's always worth checking what your local carrier supports as well arsenic whether there's a carrier-specialised interlingual rendition.