Huawei Honor 8 Review: A Stylish, Affordable Android Smartphone

Name: Huawei Honor 8 Android Smartphone
Brand: Huawei

by Paul Lilly — Friday, November 18, 2016, 11:29 AM EDT

Next up, we have GFXBench, which has been one of our standard mobile graphics performance benchmarks for quite a while now. In order to ensure v-sync and resolution are not limiting factors, we are comparing Offscreen test results here.

3D Graphics Benchmarks: 3DMark, Basemark X & GFX Bench

Pushing The Pixels

Huawei Honor 8 GFXBench Manhattan Offscreen

GFXBench provides further proof of the Mali 880 MP4's shortcomings. The Honor 8 just isn't built for the hardcore gamer, though to the phone's credit, it did manage a not-too-shabby 41 frames per second in the T-Rex test. That's serviceable for the casual gamer, though as you can see there are several competitors that offer around twice the graphics performance.

We also ran with Futuremark's 3DMark benchmark, which has been a staple 3D graphics benchmark at HotHardware across all mobile and desktop platforms for many years. In this case we were running 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, which is targeted for mobile devices and also runs at 720p in offscreen mode, so as to take display resolution out of the equation.

Huawei Honor 8 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

Huawei Honor 8 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited FPS

In case you need additional convincing that the Honor 8 isn't a phone for hardcore gamers, 3DMark's Ice Storm tests coldly provide a reality check. The Honor 8 earns a place in the back across the board—not quite a last place finish (that distinction belongs to the Moto G4), but only a few rungs up from it.

We also decided to toss in Basemark X, which is another cross-platform graphics benchmark that employs a real mobile game engine called Unity.

Our final graphics evaluation drives the point home one last time. The Honor 8 did a little better here and managed to edge ahead of the Mate 8, but neither one turned in particularly impressive scores here. Did we mention this is a $350 - $400 handset?

Tags: Reviews, Android, smartphone, Huawei, review, honor 8

Paul Lilly

Paul is a seasoned geek who cut this teeth on the Commodore 64. When he's not geeking out to tech, he's out riding his Harley and collecting stray cats.