Huawei Mate 10 Pro Review: Impressive Camera, Battery Life And A Funky UI
Huawei Mate 10 Pro Gaming And Graphics Performance
Next we'll test the Mate 10 Pro with GFXBench, which has been one of our standard mobile graphics performance benchmarks for quite a while now. In order to ensure display resolution and refresh rate are not limiting factors, we are comparing Off-screen test results here. GFXBench tests OpenGL ES graphics workloads and we're specifically testing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0 rendering performance in the following two benchmark modules, with OpenGL ES 3.0 being a more enhanced and advanced rendering API for mobile graphics.
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Samsung's Galaxy S9+ and Apple's iPhone X lead the pack by a comfortable margin. After that, it's the Mate 10 Pro that sits atop the rest of the field. What we are seeing here is the Mali-G72 MP12 graphics processor at work. It's obviously not within any real striking distance of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 with its Adreno 630 graphics engine or Apple's A11 Bionic. However, it does best every previous generation chipset, including the Snapdragon 835.
There are two takeaways here. One is that competing flagships that come out this year are going to render graphics faster than the Mate 10 Pro, which is something to consider if you want the absolute best performance. The other takeaway is that there is still some impressive horsepower inside the Mate 10 Pro. It doesn't snatch the performance crown from Apple or wrestle with Samsung for second place, but in its own right, the Mate 10 Pro is capable of delivering a high-end experience.
There are two takeaways here. One is that competing flagships that come out this year are going to render graphics faster than the Mate 10 Pro, which is something to consider if you want the absolute best performance. The other takeaway is that there is still some impressive horsepower inside the Mate 10 Pro. It doesn't snatch the performance crown from Apple or wrestle with Samsung for second place, but in its own right, the Mate 10 Pro is capable of delivering a high-end experience.
We also ran with Futuremark's 3DMark benchmark suite, which has been a staple 3D graphics testing tool 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. This test and its 3D graphics engine is based on the aging OpenGL ES 2.0 API, but we'll follow-up with 3DMark Sling Shot here as well, which is much more advanced.
The Mate 10 Pro did not perform quiet as well in 3DMark, as it slipped a few pegs to land in the middle of the pack. This is another example of benchmark rankings versus realized performance. There are phones that are measurably faster, and based on the data, that should continue to be the case as more devices are released with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 underneath the hood. But in terms of isolated performance, putting up over 220 frames per second in one of 3DMark's Ice Storm tests and over 113 fps in the other is nothing to scoff at.
Futuremark 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Benchmark
Futuremark 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Benchmark
3DMark Sling Shot is a new benchmark module that's been added to the 3DMark mobile test suite, so again we have fewer results in our database to share, though we do have a few top-shelf Android phones, Apple's latest flagship the iPhone X, and Samsung's previous-gen Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 series in the mix. Sling Shot is a much more advanced OpenGL ES 3.1 and Metal API-based test that employs more advanced rendering techniques like volumetric lighting and particle illumination. In this test we again run the Off-screen mode, so as to remove display resolution differences from the equation and thus compare cross-platform results more reliably.
This is where the Mate 10 Pro starts to falter. Sling Shot Extreme is a more demanding benchmark, and the Kirin 970 with its Mali-G72 GPU starts to buckle here. The last place finish is a little deceiving because we have a much smaller sample size to work with. But at the same time, these numbers show the Mate 10 Pro struggling with more demanding graphics rendering. This isn't something that we noticed much outside of benchmarking, though it could conceivably come into play sometime down the line if games emerge that push the envelope.
