The HTC 10 Review
by Joshua Ho on September 19, 2016 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
One of the major areas worth discussing when it comes to mobile devices is computing performance. As much as OEMs try to not talk about this, ultimately what distinguishes a smartphone from a featurephone or simple flip phone is dramatically improved compute. Running a web browser, running a full Linux OS with apps that require JIT or AOT compilation are all tasks that demand large amounts of system memory and compute. Similarly, any kind of 3D game is going to require quite a bit of compute power and memory in general. As mentioned in previous reviews a major focus for this year has been trying to make our benchmarks more focused on real-world performance, so we’ll be better able to show how the HTC 10 actually performs relative to other devices on the market.
In the basic browser benchmarks, we can see that the HTC 10 is pretty much on par with all other Snapdragon 820 devices. This shouldn't really come as a surprise given how much of an optimization target all of these benchmarks are for the OEMs and SoC vendors, but performance in general on Snapdragon 820 is not necessarily great for web browsing with Chrome.
PCMark is very sensitive to DVFS changes in most cases so it's interesting to see how closely it performed to the Galaxy S7 and G5. What is notable here is the poor showing in video playback, which persists even if you use HTC's CPU cheats which are still accessible from the developer settings. The average scores that PCMark records is significantly higher than what I can achieve with the HTC 10 unless I enable high CPU performance mode. Determining what this means has been left as an exercise to the reader.
Looking at the HTC 10 overall results it might be tempting to simply suggest that overall performance is comparable to the Galaxy S7 with S820 but when you look at the individual breakdown the main reason why the HTC 10 seems to be so slow is because the location provider in Maps is causing its launch time to be significantly higher than most phones I've seen before. In just about every other situation the Galaxy S7 is significantly behind the HTC 10. Overall, I think the HTC 10 performance is in line with what I'd expect for a Snapdragon 820 phone here.
183 Comments
View All Comments
SomeDude2552 - Sunday, September 25, 2016 - link
I'm starting to think that you are retarded, pull yourself togheter.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
There are also many of us that wait 6-8 moths after a phone releases before buying it, both to maximize the use of a previous phone and to let all the bugs get worked out before buying.bigboxes - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Yes.jospoortvliet - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Another one here. I wait until prices have become reasonable.JoshHo - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Dead or not, there seems to be a lot of demand for a review of one even at this point in the lifecycle. It hasn't taken a lot of time away from any other reviews in the pipeline as much of this was written shortly after GS7 part 2.fanofanand - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Thank you for finishing this and getting it out there Josh, I know you have had a lot of demands placed on you and this will at least silence a portion of the complaints.MrSpadge - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
"... and this will at least silence a portion of the complaints"Not sure about this. I've got the impression some people nowadays just go to a random review, state their desinterest in it and demand a review of something else. I won't mind being proven wrong, though.
MrSpadge - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
(I mean: in this case silencing wouldn't work as they'd soon switch to demanding the next review of some other phone)ToTTenTranz - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Same here. I know I was one of the people constantly nagging AT for this, so I'm really grateful.zeeBomb - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Thanks man for everything. The demand for thisreview was too much, and now people are complaining? People logic