LG Optimus G Pro Benchmarks

I’m spending a decent amount of time using the LG Optimus G Pro before finalizing the Ubergizmo review, but I thought that I would drop a quick note about the LG Optimus G Pro benchmark numbers as some of you may be impatient to know how it performs in the real world. Overall, the results are much better than the original model that we had reviewed. The performance is now much more stable (less variations in-between runs) and we feel like LG did a lot of tuning on its software, that’s a really good thing. The original Optimus G had huge variations, and we ended up averaging the results, which explains that it scored lower than the average Snapdragon S4 Pro handsets out there. Overall, we’re still pretty close from S4 Pro levels of performance, but there are differences worth noting.

Antutu 3.x is an overall system performance benchmark (CPU, graphics, storage), and what it shows is that overall, most recent phones land in a comparable performance footprint. This means that unless you do something very specific (like “gaming” or “downloads”), those phones should provide a similar overall performance.

As you can see, the LG Optimus G Pro lands among the leading smartphones available on the market today. In this particular benchmark, it is basically neck to neck with the XPERIA Z smartphone that uses a Snapdragon S4 Pro. Keep in mind that this is a “system” test, so it’s not only about the Snapdragon S600 chip, but also about the memory and the storage subsystems.

GLBenchmark 2.5, offscreen 1080p: this test has been designed to “stress” the graphics processor (GPU) by running a game-like demo which features a fight between various characters in many different environments (indoors, outdoors…).  (try it for yourself).

Given that both the Snapdragon S4 Pro and the Snapdragon S600 use an Adreno 320 GPU core, it’s expected that they would exhibit similar performance in graphics benchmarks. This also indicated that despite the change in CPU clock (Krait core), the S600 seems to have the same GPU clock (in MHz) than the S4 Pro.

GeekBench 2: Geekbench tends to focus on synthetic floating point calculation performance rather than multi-core scalability. This is a good measure for general computing and generating accurate physics in games.

Here, we can see a noticeable increase in the computational power of the Snapdragon S600 over the Snapdragon S4 Pro. This makes sense, since the S600 can go up to 200MHz faster (that’s about 12% beyond 1.7GHz). The results show a near 30% performance increase in the Geekbench 2 score from the Nexus 4 which uses a Snapdragon S4 Pro, so Qualcomm has worked on more than the frequency increase.

Quadrant Standard Edition: I’ve seen some articles go by about how effective Snapdragon S600 is with Quadrant, and I can confirm that it scores beyond 12000. Compare that with a 7000 score that the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (which uses an Exynos 4412 system on chip). Wow! right? The thing is, I can’t quite spot anything in the specs that would translate into a 71% performance increase. That’s also true for real-world apps, so I would be very cautious with the interpretation of that particular score (and with this benchmark in general…).

Conclusion

Synthetic benchmarks can only carry us so far. What they don’t show for example is the user experience is smooth and responsive (responsiveness is not always solved with brute-force processor power). In the end, what good is raw performance if you can’t perceive it?

With almost a week of use, I have noticed that the LG Optimus G Pro is noticeably snappier (the user interface is always super-fluid) than virtually every S4 Pro systems that I had my hands on. The Google Nexus 4 was probably the fastest of all, since the graphics interface is using the “pure” Google stock code, without any modifications. It’s not “all hardware”, and in fact, I suspect that Qualcomm and its partners have been optimizing their software on a “platform-level” because all the Snapdragon S600 phones do run very smoothly.

This is certainly not the groundbreaking 70% of performance improvement that Quadrant would indicate, but I feel like it’s closer to a 20%-30% improvement, and we have yet to measure the battery life (which we expect to be better) to get the whole story.

I hope that this short overview of the LG Optimus Pro G benchmarks and performance gave you a good peek at what this smartphone is going to be. The complete review should be out very soon, but in the meantime, you can read our Optimus G Pro hands-on at Mobile World Congress.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: benchmarks, LG, MWC, MWC 2013, Optimus G Pro, performance