WPCentral and Snapdragon 400.. A Long and Incoherent Ramble.

[Daniel Rubino]

THIS. Basemark is terrible. Dan shouldn't have included it in his comparison. Totally misleading.

Suggest another app to bench then.

I use Basemark for two reasons: it is cross-platform, so I can compare it to an iPhone or Android device and it offers some semblance of numbers.

If you want me to do just videos of me opening and closing apps/games for 10 minutes, I can, but it still lacks any consistency.

Numbers are numbers. I run the tests multiple times, pick the highest scores, and keep the devices in the same state as outlined in the articles. In short, it is better than nothing. But hey, if you have a better solution to bench, I am more than willing to give it a go. But simply complaining about the test ain't gonna cut it, sorry.

There is a reason I do both benchmarks and 'real world' tests and that is to make everyone happy. Don't like benchmarks? Then read the part where I talk about my experience in using the phone. Don't like my experiences or don't believe I am objective? Fall back on the benchmarks. If you have better ideas on how to go about this though, let me hear 'em.

 

[Daniel Rubino]

Why does Daniel Rubino and other authors continue to spatter 'Quad Core'?

What am I saying that is false about Quad Core? I have the 920 and 830 in front of me. The 830 is faster at some tasks. It has a newer SoC in it that happens to be ******* quad-core.

??

I do not believe I have said anything else about the SoC and why it is better.

Can I be honest? Much in this thread just sounds like whining and sour grapes about the Lumia 920 and my conclusions, which I still stand by. If you want to prove to me that the 830 does not load some games and apps faster than the 920, then go ahead. Otherwise, this thread is a waste.

 

[teller34]

Too many people seem to worry about clock speeds and benchmarks. I have 2 work phones.
1: A galaxy s4.
2: A iPhone 5s.
The galaxy s4 is lighting fast. At least for a while. The iphone 5s runs on inferior hardware when compared to the s4,but the 5s runs great. Bottom line. Don't worry about cores, speeds and such. Worry about how well it performs for you,do you like the looks, do you like the features. If so; don't worry about the rest.

 

[kevm14]

I use Basemark for two reasons: it is cross-platform, so I can compare it to an iPhone or Android device and it offers some semblance of numbers.

Dan the issue is the 830 is a faster phone than the 920. Not by much but it is faster. It's better at multitasking with the same 1GB ram. Games that run worse are just not optimized for S400, because other games load quite a bit faster than the 920. I assume things are as optimized as they're going to get for the S4...

Being cross platform and being useful to compare across platforms are two different things. I appreciate the intention but I don't believe there IS a cross-platform benchmark tool for all-around performance. Comparing non-gaming across platforms makes no sense anyway. You can compare games, browsers and apps directly. Any attempt to quantify the differences in a convenient-to-run app is, I think, not useful.

There ARE GPU benchmarks that are better, as far as I've seen. Basemark fails one pretty key test: results are variable run to run. That's a sign of a badly coded benchmark. Maybe it's not possible to code a good all-around benchmark app. If that's true, then the answer is not to use what is available, but not to use one at all, because it ends up misleading people.

 

[1101x10]

Basemark fails one pretty key test: results are variable run to run. That's a sign of a badly coded benchmark. Maybe it's not possible to code a good all-around benchmark app. If that's true, then the answer is not to use what is available, but not to use one at all, because it ends up misleading people.

That's always going to be the case as the benchmark app is not the only thing running on the phone. The OS and other background apps are periodically doing some work and taking a small slice from the CPU and memory/disk IO.

 

[kevm14]

Even with those things considered, I don't think it should vary as much as it does. Mainly because a smartphone OS like WP should give pretty high priority to the foreground application. That's why I think it's just a bad benchmark tool.

 

[Chris_Germany]

Maybe the 830 is a little bit slower than 930, but battery life is so much greater!
That's more important than a few milliseconds faster resumes...
My 830 does everything in a nice quick way. I cant complain at all.
And it lasts 2 days! My 620 (with bigger battery than the stock one) lasted just one day...

 

[Tellus82]

A thing they don't mention is the varied results of each benchmark, or the fact that figures within 1% definetly falls within normal difference between runs, making conclusions based of extremly small differences as they do isn't to smart. But it's still nice to see.

 

[hcrick]

Real world usage shows the Snapdragon 8xx to be slightly faster but nowhere near what the benchmarks would lead you to believe.

 

[teller34]

Where I see the 8xx processors being far superior is in the future. They will handle upgrades to the is and games better. That being said WP 920 is just starting to and it runs ok. The truth is most people will be on to another phone by the time the 830 is unbearably slow.

 

[AdamInTx]

Where I see the 8xx processors being far superior is in the future. They will handle upgrades to the is and games better. That being said WP 920 is just starting to and it runs ok. The truth is most people will be on to another phone by the time the 830 is unbearably slow.

This right here ^^^^^. I'm still on a Lumia 900 and very rarely do I think "man this thing runs like garbage". It still runs almost as fast as it did when I got it. I cannot say the same for the iPhone I had before the lumia or the iPhones my wife still likes to get. With every update the phone gets slower. I plan on buying the 830 whenever MS decides to offer it to the US and I can bet that when my contract is up it will still be an excellent phone and running just fine. I think to many people get hung up on benchmarks and even though their phone is running at a good speed in actual use its X% slower than some other phone on benchmark tests so it must be getting crappy. Worry less about the numbers and more about how it actually works when you need to do something.

 

[Yazen]

What am I saying that is false about Quad Core? I have the 920 and 830 in front of me. The 830 is faster at some tasks. It has a newer SoC in it that happens to be ******* quad-core.

??

I do not believe I have said anything else about the SoC and why it is better.

Can I be honest? Much in this thread just sounds like whining and sour grapes about the Lumia 920 and my conclusions, which I still stand by. If you want to prove to me that the 830 does not load some games and apps faster than the 920, then go ahead. Otherwise, this thread is a waste.

Lock the thread then. Rants and rambles are all about sour apples and grapes
Big fan of your articles, what I probably should have typed was something like "When he dubs an improvement due to the S400".

Interestingly enough, pressing back on Internet Explorer while it is being pointed to wpcentral.com causes all of the load bars to disappear!
Need proof??


P.S: I know one of you dubbed the brightness profile being capable because of the S400 chipset and then later removed it out.