Sony Xperia Z vs. HTC Butterfly: A tale of two screens

Synthetic benchmarks

The HTC Butterfly and Xperia Z are running on the same power setup. A quad-core Snapdragon Pro chipset with four 1.5 GHz Krait cores, 2 GB of RAM and the Adreno 320 graphics chip. With this configuration on tap it's safe to say that both phones have a strong claim to be among the elite in current top tier devices. Also the playing field is level due to the same resolution on the displays. So things could come down to which proprietary OS is heavier - Sony's or HTC's Sense - and which manufacturer coached its device better for the specific benchmark (yes, they do that).

We have included the HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro as references as they both boast the superior Snapdragon 600 with its more advanced Krait 300 cores.

We start off with BenchmarkPi. Calculations per core is the target of the test and the lower score the better. Here the Krait 300 cores inside the Optimus G Pro and HTC One have the upper hand with close to twice as good a score compared to the Xperia and HTC. Still both devices got great results, besting the Oppo Find 5 and Optimus G among others.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• LG Optimus G Pro
  147
• HTC One
  151
• Sony Xperia Z
  264
• HTC Butterfly
  266
• Oppo Find 5
  267
• 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 judges single and multi-threaded processor performance. It's more of the same here - the Optimus G Pro topped the chart while the Xperia Z and Butterfly trail just behind the HTC One, but only slightly.

Linpack

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G Pro
  743
• HTC One
  646
• Sony Xperia Z
  630
• HTC Butterfly
  624
• 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

AnTuTu is a compound benchmark - it test everything from memory speed to CPU and GPU performance. Here the Xperia Z did take a slight advantage over the HTC Butterfly.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• HTC One
  22678
• Sony Xperia Z
  20794
• LG Optimus G Pro
  20056
• HTC Butterfly
  19513
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15547
• Oppo Find 5
  15167

GLBenchmark is one of the more serious graphics benchmarks available. We tested the off-screen performance as that shows the true prowess of a graphics chip. The Sony Xperia Z managed 29fps on the 1080p off-screen test, while the Butterfly came close behind at 27.9 fps.

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p off-screen)

Higher is better

• HTC One
  34
• Asus Padfone 2
  31
• Oppo Find 5
  30
• Sony Xperia Z
  29
• LG Optimus G
  29
• HTC Butterfly
  27.9
• 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

SunSpider is JavaScript-based, where the the HTC Butterfly finished just behind the Xperia Z. Truth be told the Sony smartphone had some luck here as its score vastly improved with the Chrome update pushed yesterday. Before that, it was doing way worse than its competitor here.

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
• LG Optimus G Pro
  1011
• Motorola RAZR i XT890
  1059
• HTC One
  1124
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1192
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1312
• Sony Xperia Z
  1336
• LG Optimus G
  1353
• HTC Butterfly
  1433
• Nexus 4
  1971
• Oppo Find 5
  2045

The same can be said about BrowserMark 2, which adds HTML5 performance to the equation. The Xperia Z again managed to beat the HTC Butterfly here and this time it did so pretty comfortably.

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• HTC One
  2262
• Sony Xperia Z
  2093
• Oppo Find 5
  1797
• Nexus 4
  1794
• Nokia Lumia 920
  1774
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• HTC Butterfly
  1475
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1247

Winner: Sony Xperia Z (by the smallest of margins). The Butterfly and the Xperia Z were tied on most tests we ran and the real-life performance of the two is pretty similar, but the newly released Chrome update helped the Sony smartphone to the victory here.