Samsung Galaxy S8 Review: Android Excellence In Performance And Design

Smartphones are increasingly becoming the way many people access the Internet. A smartphone needs to have a responsive web browser system to render complex pages fast, along with a reliable cell or WiFi connection. We can’t easily, quantitatively state how well these radios perform in various phones, as the variables between carriers and access points are too difficult to lock down, but we can investigate browser performance between devices.

For our first tests we're using the JetStream benchmark for Javascript and RightWare’s Web Test 3.0 for comprehensive web performance analysis, including HTML5 rendering. Here we'll primarily determining how the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835's core CPU architecture handles this workload, along with the Galaxy S8's web browser software stack.

JetStream and BrowserMark JavaScript and Browser Testing

Though Apple's browser and software performance has always reined supreme in these two tests, we have new Android-based leaders in the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. Incidentally, though we ran the test on both the current version of Chrome mobile, Samsung's pre-installed Internet app actually proved to be slightly faster. We still prefer Chrome due to the Samsung browser's navigation ribbon at the bottom sometimes grabbing precious screen real estate, but it's worth noting Samsung has tuned this software well. 

AnTuTu 6 Platform Benchmarks

AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of metrics ranked with somewhat nebulous scores, rather than frame rates or time to complete. We tested with the latest version of AnTuTu across all platforms including Android, iOS and even Windows Phone. AnTuTu returns four top level performance metric results that we are including here: CPU, RAM, 3D, UX (or User Experience), along with a total score. Since this is an Android benchmark, we don't have Apple products to show in the mix here. 

  

Samsung's Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ take the top two spots here again among Android handsets, specifically showing strong 3D and CPU performance, but generally well-balanced results across the board. 

Geekbench Synthetic CPU Testing

In the GeekBench test, we're stressing only CPU cores in a handset (not graphics), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The test comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing. 

Though the octal-core Kirin 950 in the Huawei Mate 8 has always been strong in this test, it's now edged-out by the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. The Snapdragon 835 has generally stronger single core performance, but is about on par, at least in Geekbench, with respect to multi-threaded workloads. Of note is the very strong single core performance of the Snapdragon 820/821 series in the previous gen handsets from Samsung, Motorola, HTC and others. This tells us that perhaps the test is running on a Snapdragon 835 efficiency core, rather than its high performance core, though we can't be sure of this and are still investigating.

Futuremark PCMark For Android General Purpose Pocket Computing Performance Metrics

Futuremark's PCMark for Android is a new benchmark addition here for us, so we have fewer results in our database of tested phones to show you. However, this is an excellent suite of tests that we highly recommend for benchmarking performance of a handset with heavier-duty tasks for things like image and video editing, as well as lighter-duty workloads like email, and web browsing. When you see the test running live it's clear its scripted application tests are carefully selected and tuned to make use of the platforms involved in a very controlled way. 

Here, the delineation lines are clearer, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ are markedly faster than current Android flagships from the recently introduced LG G6, to Google's Android purist Pixel Xl handset, both of which are powered by the previous-gen Qualcomm Snapdragon 821. Here, performance of the Snapdragon 835 drives the new Samsung phones ahead of the others, though the Video Editing test didn't show quiet as favorably versus the LG or Google smartphones. However, the Photo Editing test showed more significant gains for the GS8 and GS8+.