Performance

Now to get down to how they both performed. Interestingly enough they both have the same CPU so the biggest differences come from the G3 having an additional gig of ram and differences in the software. By that I mean both tune differently to give the best balance in performance and battery life. To start things off I ran both phones through benchamarks specific to net browsing. In all three tests I was extremely impressed with how much faster the G3 was considering the same hardware. The additional ram clearly made a difference here.

Moving on to 3D and gaming testing I ran through both 3DMark and also a few GFXBench tests. Here the performance was much closer together with the G3 actually performing slightly slower in 3DMark. It’s also interesting to see here how both of the phones compare to their previous models. In 3DMark the LG G2 comes in fairly close to the G3 and the S5 where the S4 is much slower. As a whole it’s really impressive to see both phones at the top or near the top of the charts near the same performance of the Nvidia Shield. I have spent a LOT of time gaming on the Shield, its performance is great even in titles originally made for the PC like Portal and Half Life. It’s great to see both phones getting so close to the same performance in a much smaller form factor.

The name PCMark might seem a little weird for phone testing, but I love using PCMark for testing our PC components so I jumped at the chance to test with the new PCMark for Android. Much like the version for the PC, they run through a variety of tests to give a good well rounded result, similar to how they do with 3DMark for Android but with less focus on gaming. The “Work Benchmark” that I ran does a web browsing test, video playback, writing, and photo editing. Here is a breakdown of what each test does.

Web Browsing measures the time to render a web page, search for content, and re-render the page after editing and adding an item. The test used the native Android WebView view.

Video Playback measures the average frame rate during playback as well as the time to load, and seek within, 1080p video content using the native Android MediaPlayer API.

Writing measures the time to open, edit, cut, copy and paste text and images into a document using the native Android EditText view.

Photo Editing measures the time taken to open, edit, and save a set of 4 MP JPEG images while using four different APIs to filter and manipulate the images.

So how well did they perform? Well sadly I only had the G3, S5, and S4 on hand to test so we will found out how they compare more in the future. So far the results are similar to what I saw in the other benchmarks with the exception of the G3 performing a little slower than the S5. Just to be completely sure that this wasn’t a thermal issue I actually ran the same test again with the LG G3 in the refrigerator to keep it cool while testing but I ended up with a similar result.

In addition to the performance test, I also added the PCMark battery test to our test suite for battery performance testing. I left our GFXBench battery benchmark as well but the difference between the two when testing was GFXBench does an estimated battery result by doing a relatively short test where PCMark actually runs the battery all the way down from between 80-100% to get a result. Because of this I trust the new PCMark scores a little more. Speaking of how did the two phones perform? Well the S5 did very well in both tests. In PCMark it shows that the S5 should see up to 310 minutes of heavy use before killing the better, this is well over the 212 minutes of the LG G3. This was a bit of a surprise because the LG G2 had amazing battery life, nearly as long as the phones designed for extended life. The LG G3 actually has a slightly higher battery capacity as well. When figuring that in with them both having the same CPU I can only assume that Samsung is doing a better job on the software side, that or our G3 has had its battery abused a little.