OnePlus 9 Pro THROTTLED Gaming! Premium Performance? By JuanBagnell

Man performance testing is just not as much fun as it used to be out of the box. A pixel 5 can run dead cells at a higher frame rate than an OnePlus 9 pro game over pack. It in sends back your OnePlus and smash that bell icon are all the lame techies. You know the ones who only read the headlines. Are they all gone? Okay, let's have a chat. This stuff sucks- I mean really trying to explain what's happening in performance- is a frustratingly long conversation and anyone who just wants it just works version of an explanation.

Computers, don't work! That way, I mean even accounting for the normal complexity. We have to explain this generation of premium phone is even more granular when it comes to performance testing, I cannot account for every combination of hardware and software, so I lean on the services and apps that I genuinely use. I really do cut video from my phone. I really do record and edit audio and when I run gaming benchmarks, I use the games that I really like to play. That's my testing preference aka, my bias, which is why I'm so desperate for anyone.

Anyone else in the phone review space to start performance testing using real world apps synthetic benchmarks are poor predictors for real world use, and we need more data. We need more reviewers and data points than just me, at least in mobile gaming. We get some additional reviewer interest and that helps so for the games. I like to play there's a hard split between games that run so well that they aren't particularly valuable for performance benchmarking and then the flip side games that are so demanding, even our top of the line premium phones can struggle to keep fluid frame rates. When I get a galaxy s21 in-house, and I play a fairly demanding game like undead horde, it's concerning to see a spike of performance and then shortly after watch that frame rate crater is the issue with Samsung or with Qualcomm.

Later I get an OnePlus 9 pro in-house, and we don't see a dramatic spike in performance, but the average frame rate is higher and more consistent. Two phones same game, same general performance settings, similar app installs in conditions and the OnePlus 9 pro delivers better performance, but then I saw a video from another reviewer golden reviewer claiming terrible performance on battle, royale titles, but I don't really play any of those, I'm less about PUBG and more battle lands. Royale! That's that's more. My speed, but still we've got another reviewer showing 60 frames per second on popular titles that can hit higher frame rates on similarly spec phones and that's a curious issue. The OnePlus 9 doesn't seem to ever push above 60 fps.

The other reviewer seemed locked at around 60 fps. My run on undead horde, never climbed above 60 fps. So there are other games that I can test for that. I recently looked at the pixel 5 updates, which improved GPU performance, and I was stunned to see how well dead cells was optimized for a mid-ranger soc in the intro section of that game. The pixel 5 keeping 90 frames per second, which just looks great well an OnePlus 9, is more powerful than a pixel 5.

So I fire up dead cells and wouldn't you know it 60 frames per second, so it would seem, there's a GPU limiter on the OnePlus. Thankfully, there is a little app called auto Hz or auto hertz, where, after you install, and then you run an ADB command, you can unlock faster frame rates so forcing the OnePlus 9 pro to max performance on dead cells, we're cranking at 120, fps, ditto, undead horde. Now the OnePlus 9 never spiked as high a peak frame rate, but also didn't crash as poorly as the s21. Without that limiter, we see similar issues as to what we saw in the galaxy, larger and more distracting swings between peak performance and average performance. It's genuinely not as nice to play when the frame rate moves around that much.

This all gets more complicated. When the s21 launched. I was really concerned about this new soc from Qualcomm. It seems to draw more power and run warmer than the chip. It replaces on paper it's more powerful but real world.

Furthermore, it's not going to be better if the phone can't keep those thermals in check. Samsung's solution on the s21 is to sell the phone pre-throttled out of the box, and the CPU was turned down below what some phones from 2020 could deliver. Then I get the OnePlus 9 pro, and it basically wins in almost every test I can throw at it, and it's not CPU throttled out of the box. Unfortunately, I have a blind spot in my testing where a handful of games that should perform better than 60 frames per second aren't represented because they're, not the games I play. But overall, when comparing performance for Samsung's enhanced mode versus the OnePlus out of the box, the OnePlus is still the overall better performer in heavier lifting tasks for the more demanding games, especially those that struggle to stay at 60fps on newer phones.

If you're not hitting that GPU limit on the OnePlus, then the OnePlus also delivers a more consistent. It's a more even frame rate. This just gets real frustrating when we know the phone is capable of more on games that are better optimized for higher refresh rate displays and honestly. This is less fun than performance testing a laptop or a desktop. A phone might have that pretty fast display, but a game might not have that phone whitelisted for faster frame rates.

Then we have to balance that against manufacturer customizations, like Samsung CPU, throttling and OnePlus GPU limiting, and every year were promised revolutionary improvements and more power, but the reality of modern smartphones were increasingly running into the thermal limits of putting more power into a pocket computer. We're at a point now where explaining performance differences means we're individually, comparing phone by phone and game by game or app by app. There is no one score easy way to describe power, there's no universal metric, which properly predicts which phone is going to be better at gaming. If a phone is perfect at undead horde, it might not be as good at dead cells, and it's no guarantee that it will be good at mention and still probably going to chug on the maps and battle chasers. But it might be good for your favorite emulator, but I digress short story frustratingly long from my harder hitting tests like video, rendering and batch photo processing, I still believe the OnePlus 9 and the 9 pro are the overall performance winners over the galaxy s21s, but this GPU thing just made the conversation a lot more complicated.

I have been putting out this call for years now, if you know of any other reviewers that are consistently testing and comparing performance on phones with real-world apps that consumers can use. Please drop me a link to their work. These new socs are very good at generating big scores when you hit them with tiny little benchmark tasks, but it's a whole different conversation when you're using your phone for one task and you want to know about that sustained performance. We've got more testing to do so stay tuned. It's going to get weird as always.

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Source : JuanBagnell