Graphics, Throttling & Storage Performance

On the last page I mentioned that on newspaper we should see the Kirin 960's GPU provide roughly 2.3x the functioning of the Kirin 955's GPU. Across every test I performed, the actual figure here is 2.35x, which is mighty close. This is an enormous gain in GPU functioning, but really information technology was only possible because the Kirin 955 packed a very weak GPU for a modernistic high-cease SoC.

With that said, the performance of the Kirin 960 here doesn't match Huawei's marketing claims for the SoC. In the Manhattan 1080p Offscreen examination, Huawei claimed the Kirin 960 can achieve l FPS, whereas the Mate 9 only achieves 29 FPS. Apparently, you lot can reach 50 FPS with the Mate nine in a freezer, simply obviously that isn't a normal operating condition. With that said, a smartphone is a very power- and thermally-limited class gene, and it's likely yous could accomplish better GPU performance with a improve thermal design.

Compared to the Adreno 530 in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, the Kirin 960'south Mali-G71 MP8 GPU is roughly 5 percent slower. This is a decent consequence for the Kirin 960 and the Mate 9, although with the Snapdragon 835 on the way, it'due south unlikely the Kirin 960 will perform as well as Qualcomm's flagship silicon.

The T-Rex examination we're using here isn't peculiarly challenging for the GPU power of the Huawei Mate 9, and so it performs quite well later on 25 minutes of gaming with minimal throttling. This is similar to what you'd wait from modern loftier-performance Android games. Punishing the Mate 9 with a more intensive benchmark, like the Manhattan 3.1 test, produces throttling closer to 30 percentage.

The Mate 9'south 64GB of internal NAND is some of the fastest going effectually in an Android smartphone. It performs particularly well in 256 kB sequential tests, although write speeds aren't quite every bit skilful as the all-time devices out there. Random functioning is likewise smashing, which leads to fantastic app loading speeds.