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WireFly just forwarded us a little video they put together pitting two of Sprint’s 4G handsets head to head to see which one tops out with the best overall performance. Using Smartbench 2010, both handsets were put through a standard benchmarking test and ranked for productivity and gaming, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Epic 4G came out the winner in both cases. The EVO Shift still held its own, taking to an early lead crunching through some basic processes, but its loss to the Epic is apparent when you see the slow down as soon as 3D graphics are thrown into the mix. Check it out for yourself below.
[via WireFly]
Good job Bob. Great video comparison. Thanks
Bob here sucks at reviews, just see the video he did on the unboxing of the htc g2 , he tried to rip the screen from its hinge
I just ran it on my evo 4g shift and i got 748 for productivity and 1071 for games.
I hope it’s clear for everyone that Adreno is the weakest series of GPU’s on the market, and will continue to remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s just too bad HTC is too stubborn in using Qualcomm’s chips, because I’m not going to buy another HTC phone until they start using other chips and give their customers more alternatives.
Epic it is and just for the GPU. Note to HTC: give us better GPUs
Hi, Dan,
That G2 video was Bob’s first unboxing/review of a hot Android phone. He’d been on the job for less than 2 weeks.
He’s improved greatly in the 4 months since then, and we here at Wirefly are proud of his work.
I’ve done a few video reviews/unboxings myself, and I can assure you they are far from easy. Trying to sound intelligent and being accurate on every detail for 7 to 10 minutes is extremely challenging. You fly without a net, hope you say everything right and don’t talk too much out of your … ;)
If you have any constructive feedback for Bob or our videos in general, we welcome and appreciate it – always.
Thanks,
Jeff Gregory
Director of SEO/YouTube
Wirefly.com
I just ran this on my epic 4g and got 1062 productivity and 2315 games.
1066 and 1064 on EVO 4g, HTC does need better graphics in there CPU builds, they have alot of orders with qualcomm and if they are going to stay with them they need to start pushing them to build more suitable GPU’s
Bob is a okay reviewer in book.. I actually like watching his review. And for his company to back him up like that, shows loyalty and teamwork. Keep up the good work:)
yea the evo shift is running froyo against eclair, not really fair is it?
i got 1094 and 2503 on my vibrant running axura’s 2271 rom by far the best froyo rom out there.
Hummingbird ftw….lol
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If the Shift has 2.2 and the Epic has 2.1, thats even more evidence that the Hummingbird = ftw…
Dude, ofcourse the freakin Epic with the humming is going to win. Why is this even a comparison.
1199 and 1329 on my DINC running CM7 Nightly #4.
great vid
i just got 1078 for prod and 2427 for games on my galaxy tab
This is a much better benchmark. I always felt like my MyTouch 4G was slow, but quadrant never showed it.
Just ran on my Epic 4g and got 1148 prod 2603 gaming I’m running on 2.2 and the improvements are awesome!
1680 and 2731 on CM7#6 on G2 at 1.516 Ghz… I can break 2k and 3k if I overclock to 2.1 Ghz. The vision series is a beast of a phone, the stock 800 mhz processor overclocks like crazy.
I ran it on my Vibrant and got 1163 prod and 2651 for games. But I am running Nero V3 with voodoo!
Nervercenter ? At the wirefly campus?
800mhz processor vs 1ghz processor? I’m not surprised.
No doubt dude that why I didnt even give the Shift a chance cause I saw 800mhz processor. haha shitz weak
The 800 Mhz processor is FAR from weak. It outperforms 1Ghz processors. The Epic has the separate GPU, that’s why it does a little better. Saying the 800 Mhz Scorpian is weak, really shows your ignorance.
This review sucks. I would put my Epic 4g rooted with froyo and ext4 against the evo shift. The Epic will blow the shift 4g out the water. My highest score with midNight rom with ext4 was 1920. And the rom gets better with each update. Wait till the froyo update is released and then u can make the comparison.
Guys, MSM7630 in the Shift is a decent processor. Even at 800MHz, it performs quite well for productivity tasks. What it lacks is on the GPU power (still better than the first gen Qualcomm based phones such as Nexus One and Evo).
If you don’t play 3D games, then you should only be interested in the productivity index. But if you do play a lot of complex 3D games, then EPIC will serve you better than any 2nd generation Snapdragon based phones (G2, myTouch 4G, EVO Shift, Desire HD, etc). I would not go as far as saying this processor is crap though.
my intercept keeps going to sleep when I try Smartbench, guess I’m working it too hard lol
If you look at 1:23 looks like the Epic is in WIFI not 4G. Were both devices in WIFI? If not this test needs to be redone to be accurate. Just my 2 cents. Other than good video.
The MSM7630 performs very well for an 800 MHz Qualcomm with the Scorpion core. It’s likely Qualcomm is making some changes to their instruction set to gain this kind of improvement even though they’ve reduced the manufacturing process of the Scorpion from 65 nm to 45 as well as downclocked the CPU. I don’t think they’ve made much in the way of actual architecture changes but with Qualcomm we’ll never know.
The MSM chips do overclock amazingly well though, and should have no issue achieving and holding a higher stable clock speed than the 1 GHz Hummingbird will. This shouldn’t come as surprise as Qualcomm had no trouble clocking a 65 nm chip at 1 GHz and thus a similar 45 nm chip should have no issues going well above the 1 GHz mark.
All that said, lets be mindful of the fact that the Epic in this review is running Android 2.1, and does not have the Dalvik JIT compiler advantage the Shift has (though the Shift’s CPU score in this review was a little low compared to what we’ve been seeing on XDA.) Epics on the leaked Android 2.2 are averaging around 1200 on the Productivity (CPU) score at 1 GHz.
Now, I’d like to address the rest of this post to Wirefly (and phandroid, since you host their reviews).
Bob, thank you very much for taking my recommendation to use the SmartBench 2010 application for benchmark tests over Quadrant. I’ve long been an opponent of Quadrant since I easily posted a score of 2597 using a simple trick made possible by the work of two talented developers. It’s just an easily manipulated benchmark that is frequently thrown off by different processors and file systems, producing results that vary wildly and are not indicative of real-word performance.
When I’d posted my outrageous (and mostly fake) Quadrant score on SmartPhoneBenchmarks.com, and openly complained about the inaccuracy of the application, the site administrator advised me that SmartBench 2010 was in the works specifically because of the observed inaccuracies of Quadrant. A couple months later, SmartBench 2010 was released, and I posted to the XDA community about its arrival as well as my findings thus far. We tested the phone on different file systems (which previously produced badly skewed results on Quadrant) and compared scores between different devices, and it’s been nearly unanimously observed to be a more accurate benchmark, particularly because it doesn’t lump the CPU and GPU scores together.
Surprisingly, the developer of the app dropped into our observations to actively ask how he could improve the application, and we rapidly saw him implement some of the community’s suggestions. In addition, he quickly rectified a problem where ad-blocking applications were causing SmartBench to crash in certain situations.
I share all of this because I’ve been impressed with the quality of the benchmark as well as the interest in the developer of the needs of the community as well as a dedication towards making the application as accurate as possible, something we have not seen from Aurora Softworks regarding Quadrant.
I write hardware reviews myself and one thing that has always bothered me is the continued use of benchmarks that have been proven inaccurate, and the subsequent rash of misinformation that tends to spread as a result. I’m glad to see that the smartphone tech community is starting to realize this trend and is taking steps towards ensuring an even playing field.
I guess the comment system doesn’t do paragraphing too well. Sorry for the wall of text. I’m not known for brevity!