Sony Xperia Z review: Zero hour

Synthetic benchmarks

The Sony Xperia Z uses a Snapdragon APQ8064 S4 Pro chipset, which is the fastest to currently power an Android phone. It packs four Krait CPU cores clocked at 1.5GHz, 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 GPU. That same chipset ticks inside the Oppo Find 5, Google Nexus 4, the LG Optimus G and the HTC DROID DNA / Butterfly.

The Krait cores are fast, no doubt about that - two of them were coming only slightly short of a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU and four make up a real beast. And the Xperia Z doesn't disappoint. It comes up on top in Benchmark Pi (which is all about single-threaded performance) and it's also on the top in Linpack (which focuses on multithreading).

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  264
• Oppo Find 5
  267
• Sony Xperia T
  269
• HTC One X+
  280
• LG Optimus G
  285
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  305
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  330
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  350
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  359
• Meizu MX 4-core
  362
• Nexus 4
  431

Linpack

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  630
• LG Optimus G
  608
• Oppo Find 5
  593
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  214.3
• Nexus 4
  213.5
• Meizu MX 4-core
  189.1
• HTC One X+
  177.7
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  175.5
• HTC One X
  160.9
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  141.5

The clean sweep continued with consecutive victories in the three compound benchmarks AnTuTu, Quadrant and GeekBench 2.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  20794
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15547
• Oppo Find 5
  15167
• Nexus 4
  15146
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  13562
• HTC One X+
  13519
• Meizu MX 4-core
  11820
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  11633
• LG Optimus G
  11226

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  8075
• HTC One X+
  7632
• LG Optimus G
  7439
• Oppo Find 5
  7111
• HTC One X
  5952
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  5916
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5450
• Meizu MX 4-core
  5170
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  4814
• Nexus 4
  4567

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  2173
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1845
• LG Optimus G
  1723
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1661
• Sony Xperia V
  1638
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  1634
• Sony Xperia T
  1625
• iPhone 5
  1601
• HTC One S
  1589
• Sony Xperia E dual
  496

We ran GLBenchmark off-screen, which means we're testing at a fixed resolution, which lets us test the raw GPU power. The Xperia Z didn't disappoint, scoring as high as the Oppo Find 5 and the Nexus 4, and a tad better than the iPhone 5.

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Oppo Find 5
  30
• Sony Xperia Z
  29
• LG Optimus G
  29
• Apple iPhone 5
  27
• Nexus 4
  26
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  17
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15
• HTC One X+
  12
• HTC One X
  9

But most games will probably want to run at native resolution, so we're including Epic Citadel, which uses Unreal Engine 3. Unreal Engine is popular with mobile game makers, so it's a pretty important test. The benchmark was run at the High Quality setting and yet the Xperia Z once again topped posting an amazing result and was pushing against the 60fps limitation of the screen for almost the entire test.

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z
  55.6
• Nexus 4
  53.9
• LG Optimus G
  52.6
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  41.3
• Oppo Find 5
  38.6

We were almost stating to suspect that the Xperia Z is an unbeatable benchmark champion, but the browser trials broke its streak. Of course that's more down to the Chrome browser than the actual computing prowess of the smartphone, but the SunSpider score of 1906ms was rather uninspiring (Update: 1336ms with the updated Chrome version). The Nexus 4 doesn't do too well here either - unlike its desktop counterpart, Chrome for Android just isn't very good at this test.

In BrowserMark 2 things started to look up again - the Xperia Z took the second place there - outrun only by the LG Optimus G, which has the same chipset but lowerscreen resolution (so, each time the phone redraws a web page, there's less than half the number of pixels to deal with). The Xperia Z also took the second place in the HTML5-test Vellamo, beaten only by the Galaxy Note II.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Ativ S
  891
• Apple iPhone 5
  915
• Nokia Lumia 920
  910
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  972
• HTC One X+
  1001
• Motorola RAZR i XT890
  1059
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1192
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1312
• Sony Xperia Z
  1336
• LG Optimus G
  1353
• Nexus 4
  1971
• Oppo Find 5
  2045

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• Sony Xperia Z
  2093
• Oppo Find 5
  1797
• Nexus 4
  1794
• Nokia Lumia 920
  1774
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1247

Vellamo

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  2418
• Sony Xperia Z
  2189
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  2078
• Oppo Find 5
  1658
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1641
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1568
• LG Optimus G
  1522
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1468
• Nexus 4
  1310

To sum things up, Sony has managed to extract more performance from the four Krait cores than any manufacturer to use this chipset. The Adreno 320 GPU does equally well - it manages playable frame rates using a real-world 3D engine at FullHD resolution. It's hardly a surprise then, that the overall user experience with this one is smooth as butter.