Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed today I'm diving into smartphones once again this time looking at the performance of the samsung galaxy s 9 plus in the previous video I looked at the battery life of the Exynos tomorrow so check that out if you haven't already here I'll be exploring all aspects of the SOC s performance including actual real world smartphone benchmarks not just your usual synthetic workloads as well as some storage performance before getting into the numbers it's good to have an idea of the hardware inside this flagship phone as with previous samsung galaxy s devices there are two variants of the galaxy s 9 and galaxy s 9 plus 1 has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 for the United States China Japan and a few other regions while the other variant has the Samsung Exynos 9 8 10 for the rest of the worlds I would love to be able to test both devices at some point but for now we have our hands on just the Exynos model so the following performance analysis is focused on the new Exynos SOC the Exynos 9 8 10 is the successor to the Exynos 88-90 5 that first appeared in the galaxy s 8 we're still looking at a dual quad-core implementation just with newer core architectures improved clock speeds and more cash the big performance cores are using the Exynos m3 design which is a much wider core design with significant IPC improvements over the Exynos m2 in the 88 95 there are four of these cores and they are clocked up to 2.7 gigahertz in single core workloads while sitting at 2.3 gigahertz in dual core loads and 1.8 gigahertz in all core workloads this tiered clock speed setup is very reminiscent of x86 chips from Intel and AMD but it's relatively rare in arm SOC s at least at the moment complementing the big cores are for smaller efficiency cause that use the cortex a 55 design clocked up to 1.8 gigahertz this is a small upgrade on the cortex a53 so used in the 88 95 along with the 100 megahertz clock speed increase on the GPU front Samsung has moved from am Ali G 71 mph 20 at 546 megahertz to am Ali G 72 mph and 572 megahertz in other words we're seeing two fewer cause than in the 88 95 but at a higher clock and using a newer design the memory controller remains the same quad 16-bit lpddr4 X controller providing twenty eight point seven gigabytes per second of bandwidth whenever you see a new SOC used in the smartphone that iterates on its powerful predecessor you typically expect better performance however with the Exodus nine eight ten in the Samsung Galaxy S nine that's not really the cases we'll explore in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and yeah that's right we are now using real-world performance benchmarks to measure smartphone performance just to give you a better idea than you might get otherwise with some of the synthetic workloads so let's kick things off by looking at browser performance in octane and Kraken here we see a decent performance improvement of around 25% for the Galaxy S nine plus in octane relative to the Galaxy S 8 plus however surprisingly it does fall behind in cracking to the tune of 17 percent and that's not the best start for an SOC that supposedly has more than a 50% IPC gain in bass mark web 3.0 the Galaxy S 9 plus is a decent 19 percent faster than the Galaxy S 8 plus with the largest gains seen in a generic suite however performance is no better than a device with the last generation 835 inside which is a concern for a newer SOC that is being shipped alongside the snapdragon 845 variant in PC Mark we're seeing relatively modest performance gains using the original work test the Exynos 9 and 10 in the galaxy s 9 plus is just four percent faster than the Exynos edit 95 looking at the overall score which breaks down into 16 percent faster in the web test 22 percent faster in the video test 18 percent slower in the writing test and 3 percent faster in the photo test in this benchmark the galaxy s 9 plus gets badly beaten by the pixel to excel with its last generation Snapdragon 835 SOC looking at the new work 2 ponyo test and it's still not great news for the galaxy s 9 plus with justice percent performance gain again it gets handily beaten by the Senate during 8:35 by around 25% in Basemark OS 22.0 interesting our benchmark now in there but the galaxy's 8 plus actually outperforms the galaxy s 9 plus by 14% in the overall score even though the Exynos 9 and 10 does eke out a win in the cpu heavy system score to the tune of 20% again not a great result for the newer Galaxy S 9 Plus in its x9 8/10 especially considering it's bitten by the Snapdragon 835 once more as these are just synthetic results I did want to examine whether we're getting any performance gains with the excellence 9 810 in real-world applications so I went back and retested a collection of smartphones in a range of widely used Play Store apps unfortunately I don't have data for the Exynos 88-90 5 in these apps by can compare the Exynos 9 at 10 to the Snapdragon 835 so we'll start with Pixlr which is a popular photo editing app and here I'm benchmarking the time it takes to save a large image with a filter applied the effect is applied at full resolution during the save process so a faster SOC can apply the effect more quickly and complete the save faster in this test the excellence 9:18 is a decent 20% faster than the Snapdragon a 35 in the pixel to excel excel benchmark is a very basic column sort of a large file with 60,000 plus rows the galaxy s 9 plus is 13% faster at complaining this sort than the pixel to excel though the HTC u 11 using the same SOC does close this gap to just 7% not a resounding win for the X nos 9 and 10 but it is better than nothing when fully loading a PDF in Acrobat Reader the galaxy s 9 plus with the Exynos 9 a 10 is again around 20% faster than the pixel to excel with its snapdragon 835 and decent performance improvement but it doesn't establish the externals chip as the outright fastest on the market with the last gen current 960 coming in very close the final benchmark we'll be unveiling today is Rowdy compression here the Exynos 9 10 was actually 18 percent slower than the Snapdragon 835 in the pixel to excel and that's a disappointing result for the X not 9 8 10 moving into graphics performance and again for the most part we're seeing relatively modest performance improvements moving from the exodus and at 95 to the Exynos nine eight ten in the GFX bench Manhattan 3.1 test we're looking at an 8% performance improvement in favor of the X nos 9 8 10 in the off-screen tests and 14 percent in the on screen test however in better news for the external Schneider 10 it does manage to outperform the Snapdragon 835 with its Audrina 540 GPU to the tune of 22 percent in the off-screen workload it's not as good news for the external antenna in 3dmark sling shot benchmark in the standard sling shot unlimited test the externals 9 and 10 is slightly slower than the X naught and at 95 in the overall score and a sizable 19% behind the Snapdragon 835 the contest does even up in slingshot extreme unlimited the 9 8 10 is 4% behind the Snapdragon 35 and 5% ahead of the Exynos 88-90 5 the final graphics benchmark we're looking at is the base mark you bow test which has heavily favored Maui GPS in the past here the X naught 9 8 10 in the galaxy s 9 plus is 14% faster than the Exynos 88-90 5 allowing to take a massive performance lead over the Snapdragon 835 this is one of the few crushing victories for excellence 9 8 10 relative to the last gen Snapdragon 835 while the excellence 9 8 10 is competitive against the Snapdragon 835 in graphics workloads and beats it in the case of GFX bench and base mark the SOC does throttle heavily in the galaxy s 9 Plus is chassis after 25 minutes of consecutive GFX benched 3.1 runs the exes 9 a 1000 was by 42% leading to a score reduction that actually placed it slower than the pixel to excel in long-term graphics workloads the pixel to excel and it's Snapdragon 805 doesn't throttle as heavily so it produces better long-term performance the results from both the CPU GPU and real-world tests are pretty interesting in my opinion for the most part the excellence nine and ten produces disappointing performance that either narrowly beats or merely equals the Snapdragon a 35 which is Qualcomm's last generation silicon it's clear that the Snapdragon 805 variant of the galaxy s 9 plus is the one to get if possible as it produces performance more in line with what we'd expect from a 20-18 SOC at least going on reviews that have tested this model lower than expected performance poses an interesting question as to what Samsung deal with the Exynos 9 at 10 in the galaxy s 9 plus luckily the folks in turn and tech have dug into the issue uncovering mostly software and firmware related problems with the X nas morale there's some great analysis on the matter and you really should read that if you're interested but I'll summarize it here as two major problems Samsung uses a hot plugging mechanism for thread migrations between course which is inefficient and the scheduler is tuned such that the CPU takes a long time to reach its maximum frequency ideally the CPU reaches peak performance as quickly as possible completes the task in a shorter period of time then shuts off to conserve power the extra lost 9 and 10 in the Galaxy S 9 Plus appears to slowly ramp up its maximum frequency which causes it to underwhelm in short workloads in terms of storage performance in the Galaxy S 9 plus and I have a 64 gig mole to review perform as well although it doesn't set new records for NAND performance and can't match the latest Huawei devices sequential performance is strong with improvements to both reads and writes compared to the Galaxy S 8 plus however randa performance remains a weak point with fairly average speeds for a high-end Android smartphone so if you're thinking of buying the Galaxy S 9 plus I definitely recommend the snapdragon 845 model if it's available in your area if you only have access to the Exynos 910 variant just know that you won't really be getting next-generation performance and will be stuck with little to no upgrades over the Exynos Galaxy S A+ or other snapdragon 835 phones I'd only advise an upgrade presuming you're most interested in performance from something two years old or even older at this point alternatively wait until there are a few more high-performance snap during eight forty five phones on the market which should be the case in the coming months that's it for this look into galaxy s 9 plus performance with the X noise model don't forget to check out the entire review of this phone on text box if you interested camera display design all that stuff that's all in the tax bot review links to that in the description below and let me know what you think about smartphone content in the description below do you want to see more of it definitely shoot me a comment and I'll catch you next time