As expected, the GPU is the weakest part of the Snapdragon 808 SoC. The Adreno 418 does outperform the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 801 by around 30%, matching gains on the CPU side, and this results in greater performance compared to the LG G3. However, comparing the G4 with its 1440p display to a 1080p device like the Sony Xperia Z3 results in an on-screen performance drop of 16%, which shouldn’t have significant repercussions in mobile gaming. The Adreno 418 is 17% slower than the Adreno 420 in the Snapdragon 805, which is expected due to its lower part number. Although this makes the Snapdragon 805 technically a better chip for 1440p gaming, despite its lower CPU performance, I don’t expect we’ll see the 805 deployed in any more 1440p devices. Despite throttling concerns, the Adreno 430 in the Snapdragon 810 was 56% faster when comparing peak performance. Once again the Galaxy S6 outperforms the LG G4 in GPU-bound tasks, recording performance 21% higher from its Mali-T760 MP8 GPU.
I was very pleased with the LG G4’s NAND performance, especially its read performance, beating most last-generation flagships by a significant margin.
The above charts show how the Snapdragon 808 throttles throughout an extended run of GFXBench’s T-Rex test. Essentially, there is no throttling to be seen: despite the apparent fluctuations in the top-left performance graph, the actual recorded scores for each of these tests only vary by ±1% across 29 iterations, which is great from a performance SoC. Temperatures and clock speeds are well managed to achieve great sustained performance.
