The GPU in the S835 has also received a healthy boost relative to the S821. We’re seeing typical raw performance gains of around 27 to 37 percent in offscreen GPU benchmarks, which is a handy gain that falls in line with what we’re seeing on the CPU side. With screens now extending beyond 2560 x 1440, the GPU is more than capable of handling those extra pixels (not that the Mi 6 uses a screen of that resolution). The comparison between the Adreno 540 and the Exynos 8895’s Mali-G71 MP20 is rather interesting, as both GPUs trade blows in offscreen benchmarks. The Adreno 540 is anywhere from 11 percent faster to 8 percent slower depending on the offscreen test, while in other benchmarks like Basemark, the Adreno GPU falls well behind. Neither GPU is slow, though, and thanks to the Mi 6’s 1080p resolution we’re seeing pretty large onscreen performance gains over 1440p displays. And finally, compared to the Kirin 960’s GPU, the Adreno 540 puts in a crushing performance to beat the G71 MP8 by upwards of 30 percent.
Bad news, everyone. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 in the Xiaomi Mi 6 throttles significantly under a GPU-heavy workload. In GFXBench’s Manhattan 3.1 test, the Mi 6 gets cut down by 43 percent after 25 minutes, matching the level of throttling seen by the Exynos variant of the Galaxy S8+. And this is even considering the lower resolution of the Mi 6’s display. Heavy throttling is always disappointing to see.
Storage performance follows the trend of the Galaxy S8+, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if both phones use the same internal storage. The Xiaomi Mi 6 exhibits fantastic sequential performance, however it suffers in random performance compared to the best smartphones on the market. Still, the NAND performance in general here is pretty good.
