The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
GPU Performance
Much like the System Performance section, I’m not expecting any big surprises in the GPU performance section. The Kirin 980 uses a Mali G76MP10 at 720MHz and while the chip isn’t blazing as much as the competition, it still performs adequately well and is a significant upgrade to last year’s Kirin 970.
In the 3DMark Sling Shot physics test, the P30s are taking the top spots in terms of performance, both in peak as well as sustained figures. The limitation here lies mainly on the part of the CPU as well as its thermal throttling characteristics. Both the P30 and P30 Pro barely throttle in this regard, at least not in GPU power constrained scenarios.
In the graphics test, we see expected results on the P30 Pro, however on the smaller P30 there’s essentially no thermal throttling at all, which is extremely peculiar.
P30 Overheating Warning & App shutdown
Shockingly enough, I didn’t manage to make the P30 throttle at all in any of the tests, as before it could even get to a point of thermal equilibrium, the OS would shut down the application and raise a thermal overheating warning. I don’t know what’s going on with devices nowadays that this keeps happening as I’ve encountered the issue in last year’s Qualcomm Galaxy S9+ with release firmware as well. The last time this happened, it was due to disabling of the thermal throttling when the OS was detecting benchmarking applications, however in our case we’re using altered application IDs. Still even with this the smaller P30 overheated repeatedly. The fact that this is an OS warning means it’s triggered by a different driver than the usual SoC thermal drivers, so something must be off on the current firmware.
In the GFXBench Vulkan High benchmark we see both P30 and P30 Pro neck-in-neck with quite excellent performance. Again what is interesting here is that both devices perform significantly better than the Mate 20s and the View20 with the same chipset. I explain this through the fact that the P30s come with newer GPU drivers, and Arm must have made more significant improvements in their Vulkan drivers.
In the Normal variant of the Aztec benchmark, we see the P30 Pro throttle a little more, yet it still manages to showcase much better performance figures than the Mate 20, and also higher peak figures than the Mate 20 Pro & View20. The smaller P30 here posts the best figures, however its sustained performance is so high simply because the device is getting extremely hot. I’ve argued if I should be posting the figures for the P30 at all since if you continue to load the device in this manner it’ll simply crash the application.
Overall, GPU performance of the P30s is in line with that of last year’s Snapdragon 845 phones, which is still great. Huawei and HiSilicon still trail behind Samsung’s Exynos Mali GPU implementations, although the difference isn’t all that big this generation.
I hope that Huawei figures out the thermal issues on the smaller P30 and issues a firmware update, I’ll be updating the article with the relevant data once this is all sorted out.
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boozed - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Yeah nahs.yu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Apr9zBuBUufHgaMUssv4Mh1vuyVh0gThis is P30P's often bragged about "50x zoom" at default magnification i.e. "zoomed out" vs. a 1" at "8x" zoom at 100% magnification. So you see with a premium compact like the Sony RX100IV or even a cheap one like Panasonic's ZS110 your *real optical* zoom combined with cropping could get you over "100x zoom" in Huawei's terms of usability.
Huawei could get you 5x but that's also worse than the 1" results notable at a glance except I forgot to make a screenshot of that.
Compacts are not dead.
s.yu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Typo, I meant the RX100VI.Quantumz0d - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
First thank you for posting that RX100 series shot. Some people think that real cameras are dead because of smartphones and their SW Gimmicks. The HW limitations truly show their stand. Not even Sony RX but even the old legend Nokia Pureview 808 or the Lumia 1020 have real purpose massive sensor with Xenon flash.Its a shame how so many cameras are being tacked on for marketing purposes, esp that night mode which kills the natural scene with over exposed unnaturally lit shot, a fake perception and deception.
boozed - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I thought the best part was the mainstream media fearmongering about the phone because of its "50x zoom". As if this is the first device to have a long focal length.s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
It may be the first phone to allow 10x digital crop directly in the camera app though...?crotach - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
DSLR has nothing to fear from these phones, it's a completely different world. MILC is taking care of the death of DSLR, but it will be a long and arduous death.Phones like these are responsible for the death of small compact cameras. These days I only see people buying the compact shooters for their kids, because they're much cheaper than a flagship phone. Give it a few more years and I doubt you'll find many compact cameras in the shops.
katsetus - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Next time I'm planning a vacation, I'll keep Luxembourg in mind.Speedfriend - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Apple is just so far behind in the camera now. Although having bought a P30 Pro, its speed in everyday use seems no faster and possibly slower than my Pixel 2 XL was. Battery life is insane though. Whereas my Pixel 2 XL was dead by the evening, the P30 Pro can make it to the next afternoonstar-affinity - Thursday, May 9, 2019 - link
At least the Iphones has video recording using 4K@60fps and the colours tend to be more natural compared to the P30 Pro in the comparisons I've seen. But sure the P30 Pro has many other advantages such as that nsane zoom and great low light performance.