![]() ![]() The iPhone XS Max lasts 83 minutes longer. The iPhone XS, with a smaller battery, lasts over 30 minutes longer in this torture test. It’s especially enlightening to see how far Apple has come in the two years since the introduction of the iPhone 7 Plus, formerly the iPhone with the largest battery (at 2900 mAh). Apple claims up to 1.5 hours longer battery life over the iPhone X, and if it lasts almost an hour longer while running Geekbench non-stop, it’s easy to believe you’ll get at least 1.5 hours more doing simpler activities. That’s more than 20 percent longer battery life under these extreme test conditions. That’s to be expected, with its comparatively big 3174 mAh battery (the largest ever in an iPhone). The iPhone XS Max lasts 50 minutes longer than the XS, and 57 minutes longer than last year’s iPhone X. In regular use, the difference would be exaggerated, and it’s easy to believe the average user will indeed see a good half-hour longer battery life. That’s not the “up to 30 minutes longer” that Apple advertises, but this is a worst-case torture test. It’s not a great analog to everyday use, but it’s a consistent and repeatable test that compares fairly between devices.ĭespite having a roughly 3 percent smaller battery than the iPhone X (2658 mAh versus 2716 mAh), the iPhone XS lasted 7 minutes longer. In the real world, you’re going to get a lot longer battery life than this, especially if you perform mostly simple tasks. What you’re looking at is nearly a worst-case scenario-screen always on at comfortable “bright indoor office lighting” setting, running very CPU and GPU intensive tests nonstop. The iPhone XS lasts a little longer than the iPhone X, and the XS Max will give you an hour or more screen-on time. The “dim display” option in Geekbench is turned off, too. We run the tests with display brightness calibrated to 200 nits on a full-white screen, with auto-brightness and True Tone disabled. We test battery life using Geekbench 4’s “full rundown” battery life test, which continually loops Geekbench tests from a full charge until the device drains completely and shuts off. What happened to the “up to 50 percent” GPU speed improvement of the A12 Bionic? Well, it’s quite possible that this test, with all of its large art assets, is entirely bottlenecked by memory bandwidth and cache performance rather than the GPU’s ability to perform computations. Really, the results are almost identical to that of the iPhone X. Sling Shot Extreme Unlimited renders the same test off-screen to avoid any speed limits from display scaling or vsync. Sling Shot Extreme runs the benchmark using Apple’s Metal API at a resolution of 2560×1440, which is then scaled to the output resolution of the test device. There’s not much of an improvement in the 3DMark Sling Shot test. Sling Shot version of the test runs a graphically intensive game-like scene before delivering a final performance score. Our favorite 3D graphics performance test is 3DMark. Chalk up the difference to benchmark inconsistency or iOS instability rather than any meaningful difference in hardware between the regular iPhone XS and the XS Max. ![]() If we could run the test a hundred times on each phone and average the best results, we’d probably see very similar scores. As we said, AnTuTu delivered often wildly different results and crashed frequently. We wouldn’t take these results to mean that the iPhone XS Max is significantly faster than the XS. There’s no one synthetic benchmark that is perfectly comparable across platforms, but Geekbench 4 comes about as close as you can get. Geekbench is a mainstay of performance benchmarking in part because it is available for so many platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. Unfortunately, there are no quality benchmarks to test that part of the chip yet. We expected it to be the biggest speed improvement in the chip, and it is, but we thought that would mean making it about twice as fast (over 1 trillion operations per second). It was the Neural Engine performance where we greatly mis-predicted. And since Apple didn’t really speed up the energy-efficient cores at all, the multi-core benchmarks are a little further behind our predicted results. Apple opted to push energy efficiency a bit more than we expected, so our single-core performance predictions are a few percent higher than the real A12 Bionic’s. There’s also a faster image processor, faster storage controller, and the Neural Engine (which speeds up machine learning tasks) is up to nine times as fast-five trillion operations per second compared to 600 billion on the A11 Bionic.Įarlier predictions about the A12 Bionic. ![]()
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