vivo NEX Dual Display review

Performance

The performance section of this review is actually going to be a pretty short one. It's not that we didn't want to test the familiar Snapdragon 845 and its 4x2.7 GHz Kryo 385 Gold & 4x1.7 GHz Kryo 385 Silver working alongside the exuberant amount of 10GB of RAM. It was just that most of our benchmarks failed to complete - perhaps due to some built-in limitation of our review unit.

The way we see things, either vivo doesn't really want us to test certain performance aspects of the phone or made some slip-up and gave us intentionally locked-down early tester hardware, where such measures are a bit more understandable for counteracting leaks. Whatever the case, we did manage to run some benchmarks and if some performance issues are what vivo was trying to mask, those will likely show up anyway.

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• ASUS ROG Phone X mode (Fan on)
  4702
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  4610
• vivo NEX Dual Display
  4576
• OnePlus 6T
  4452
• HTC U12+
  4300
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  4196
• vivo NEX S
  4167
• Razer Phone 2
  4163
• LG V40 ThinQ
  4003
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  3939
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  3895
• Xiaomi Mi 8
  3858
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  3713
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  3700
• Oppo Find X
  3636
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  3354
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  3064

Unfortunately, GeekBench - our typical go-to pure CPU benchmark refused to run on the NEX Dual Display. The closest thing we have are compound benchmarks like Basemark OS 2.0. Here the phone reports a plausible score, but one that still looks a bit too high. Just to make sure there is no blatant cheating afoot here, we ran a custom version of said APK with a changed package id. It posted nearly identical results, so our best guess is that the NEX Dual Display is doing some optimization behind the scenes, toggling a boosted mode, of sorts, to achieve the best possible peak performance.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  308050
• OnePlus 6T
  293994
• vivo NEX Dual Display
  292042
• Oppo Find X
  291218
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode (Fan on)
  288821
• vivo NEX S
  287081
• Razer Phone 2
  285051
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  284555
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  273913
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  265314
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  264044
• HTC U12+
  263696
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  258244
• LG V40 ThinQ
  254304
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  248823
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  246660
• Xiaomi Mi 8
  217298

This explains the unusually high AnTuTu score as well and also puts into perspective the fact that the phone got pretty hot during testing. Indeed, a thermal-throttle test did reveal that the vivo NEX DD is perfectly content to ramp its performance up to 11 for a short period and then suffer the consequences of having to rapidly dial in back. This could potentially cause frame rate dips and unpleasant slow-downs in gaming. We would much rather prefer a more balanced and pre-emptive sustained approach to thermal management. This fixation with numbers is not really doing real-world use any favors.

On to graphics then, where we ran into yet another issue, this time with GFXBench. The vivo simply refused to connect to the testing servers and the benchmark never ran. Still, we do have Basemark X to examine and from the looks of things, the Adreno 630 is performing well within expectations.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• ASUS ROG Phone X mode (Fan on)
  60171
• Razer Phone 2
  54750
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  44780
• vivo NEX Dual Display
  44443
• HTC U12+
  44390
• LG V40 ThinQ
  44260
• Samsung Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon)
  44013
• OnePlus 6T
  43886
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  43843
• vivo NEX S
  43810
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  43652
• Xiaomi Mi 8
  43285
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  43073
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  42134
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  41994
• Oppo Find X
  40537
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  40269

Mind you, since the panel on the vivo NEX Dual Display has a native FullHD resolution, it naturally has a certain advantage in on-screen rendering tasks, over other QHD flagships. Just like the OnePlus 6T, for instance. In fact, if you really want to maximize frame rates playing on the rear FullHD panel is actually a good approach. With an aspect ratio of 16:9 it has even fewer pixels to render on to than the main display. Of course, we would have been able to illustrate this on-screen rendering frame rate advantage better if vivo had let us run GFXBench. But, we digress.

As far as synthetics are concerned, the vivo Dual Display puts on a great show. In fact, a bit too good at times. Real-world performance is also perfectly adequate since there is only so much you can do to push a Snapdragon 845 against thermal limits. Still, the phone does employ a "benchmark-oriented" approach to its thermal and performance management curve and it does get noticeably hot with heavy loads. Take that as you will.