LG V20 v. Huawei Mate 9: Camera-derie between rivals

Performance

Smartphone makers learned a hard lesson when Qualcomm dropped the ball with the Snapdragon 810. Companies like Huawei and Samsung have their own chips to fall back on while LG seems in development of a chip to power its flagships, none has materialized yet.

The Kirin 960 chipset inside the Huawei Mate 9 is built on ARM tech, the latest generation. This means Cortex-A73 processor cores (four for the big cluster) and Mali-G71 GPU (the first to use the new Bifrost architecture).

The Snapdragon 820 is custom Qualcomm tech - from the Kryo cores (2+2) to the Adreno 530 GPU. Adrenos are usually the best GPU's this side of the Apple/Android divide so Snapdragons are great chips for gaming. But first things first.

AnTuTu 6 and Basemark OS 2.0 fail to give a definitive answer on which phone is faster for general use. Both phones have 4GB of RAM and up to 64GB of fast UFS 2.1 storage so opening apps and switching between them is a breeze.

AnTuTu 6

Higher is better

• LG V20
  141945
• Huawei Mate 9
  122826

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  2637
• LG V20
  2159

Digging in deeper, it seems that a Cortex-A73 core outpaces a Kryo core. It helps that they are clocked higher (2.4GHz vs. 2.15GHz) even though Qualcomm fabbed the chips on Samsung's 14nm FinFET process. Samsung managed to get its own Mongoose core up to 2.3GHz on this process. The Kirin is born out of 16nm TSMC FinFETs (used by Nvidia and AMD for their latest GPUs).

GeekBench 4 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  1898
• LG V20
  1576

It should come as no surprise then that the multi-core performance swings heavily in favor of the Huawei Mate 9. Individual cores are faster and there are more of them, seems like a no-brainer.

GeekBench 4 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  6112
• LG V20
  3824

Let's move on to gaming and split it into two parts. Starting with raw power, the LG V20 and its Adreno 530 GPU has a 30% to 50% lead on its opponent. This, however, assumes that the games renders at 1080p instead of the native QHD resolution (which many games do).

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG V20
  40
• Huawei Mate 9
  30

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG V20
  29
• Huawei Mate 9
  22

GFX 3.1 Car scene (offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG V20
  20
• Huawei Mate 9
  13

If a game chooses to go to native resolution, then the Huawei Mate 9 comes out on top with a 15% to 35% margin. So it depends on what a game developer wants to cut to hit the target frame rate - resolution or graphics fidelity.

The LG V20 allows you to make that choice for the game - from the Power settings you can set the resolution and framerate to High, Medium or Low. By reducing the resolution, you can allow the LG V20 GPU to deliver high frame rates at even complex games. Reducing the framerate is useful for a different reason, it prolongs battery life. You can even set these for each game individually, so only troublesome games are affected.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  28
• LG V20
  25

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  23
• LG V20
  17

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  14
• LG V20
  12

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  36519
• LG V20
  29385

Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 9
  794
• LG V20
  526

Winner: Tie. Huawei chose the right chip for the job, the processor is plenty fast and the GPU is a great match for the 1080p screen. The LG V20 could leverage its more powerful GPU if you allow it to render at less than QHD. Its storage is faster where it counts too.