LG G3 Smartphone Review: A Plethora Of Pixels And A Laser!
The LG G3 combines cutting-edge hardware, including a 5.5-inch WQHD screen and laser autofocus system, with a lightweight body and slim bezels to create a phone that was ahead of its time. Is it still worth your consideration? Read on for our impressions.
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
Results: CPU Core Benchmarks
AnTuTu X
AnTuTu is an Android system benchmark designed to test the performance capabilities of four major aspects of mobile devices: Graphics (encompassing 2D, UI and basic 3D), CPU (fixed, floating-point and threading), RAM (read and write) and I/O (read and write).
The results for AnTuTu X are sorted based on the overall scores, which are the values shown within the left end of each bar. The overall score is not simply a cumulative value based on the individual test scores. Instead, it’s a separate calculation with its own distinct value. This is why the length of the bars don’t correlate with the overall score.
In this system-level benchmark, the overall scores for the LG G3 and Samsung Galaxy S5 are within 4%, as we would expect. The OnePlus One posts a higher overall score than the other two Snapdragon 801-based devices, largely due to its higher score in the GPU test. However, it falls behind in the the UX, RAM and CPU tests, all of which stress threaded CPU performance to some degree.
AndEBench Pro
AndEBench Pro is produced by The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) and uses carefully designed, low-level algorithms for testing CPU, GPU, memory and storage subsystem performance. The benchmark workload includes XML parsing, data compression, GUI rendering, photo manipulation and cryptography tasks.
The G3 and Galaxy S5 exhibit similar performance in the CPU, memory bandwidth and memory latency tests. The OnePlus One, despite sharing the same SoC with the G3 and S5, shows about a 6% and 10% advantage in memory bandwidth and memory latency, respectively.
In the storage test, the G3 does comparatively well, outpaced only by the Note 4. Surprisingly, the S5 achieves less than half the performance of the G3.
Basemark OS II Full (Anti-Detection)
Basemark OS II is an all-in-one tool designed for measuring overall performance of mobile devices. It scores each device in four main categories: System, Memory, Graphics and Web. The System score reflects CPU and memory performance, specifically testing integer and floating-point math, along with single- and multi-core CPU image processing using a 2048x2048, 32-bit image. Measuring the transfer rate of the internal NAND storage (Memory) is done by reading and writing files with a fixed size, files varying from 65KB to 16MB, and files in a fragmented memory scenario. Calculating the Graphics score involves mixing 2D/3D graphics inside the same scene, applying several pixel shader effects and displaying 100 particles with a single draw call to test GPU vertex operations. The benchmark is rendered at 1920x1080 off-screen 100 times before being displayed on-screen. Finally, the Web score stresses the CPU by performing 3D transformations and object resizing with CSS, and also includes an HTML5 Canvas particle physics test.
There are no real surprises in Basemark OS II. The overall scores for the three Snapdragon 801-based devices fall within a 9% range. The Note 4 pulls ahead thanks to the performance of its Adreno 420 GPU in the Graphics test. Compared to the G3, the Snapdragon 600 in the Oppo N1 scores 30% lower, with a large deficit in the Graphics test.
Geekbench 3 Pro (Anti-Detection)
Primate Labs' Geekbench offers a wide selection of cross-platform compatibility, with apps available for Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android. This simple system benchmark produces two sets of scores: single- and multi-threaded. For each, it runs a series of tests in three categories: Integer, Floating Point and Memory. The individual results are used to calculate category scores, which, in turn, generate overall Geekbench scores.
Again we see the G3, One and S5 perform nearly the same in the single-threaded tests, with a slight variation in the Memory score. The Note 4 sees less than a 10-percent advantage from its higher clock speed.
There’s a bit more variation in the multi-threaded tests. The Galaxy S5 demonstrates a slight advantage over the G3. The OnePlus One encounters a problem when trying to use multiple cores and its performance drops to that of the Snapdragon 600 in the Oppo N1.
MobileXPRT 2013
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capture any data for either the Performance or User Experience tests for the G3. The benchmark runs repeatedly crashed and none of them ran to completion.
Current page: Results: CPU Core Benchmarks
Prev Page How We Tested Next Page Results: HTML5 And JavaScript BenchmarksStay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
30-year-old Pentium FDIV bug tracked down in the silicon — Ken Shirriff takes the microscope to Intel's first-ever recall
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.2 claims to improve Arrow Lake performance by up to 33%, theoretically matching the Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Empyrean Technology gives control to CEC after U.S. blacklisting — China’s top developer of chip design systems hands reins to state-owned firm
-
Vorador2 At this point, i wouldn't bother. Rumors have surfaced than a successor will be launched in March.Reply
Tom's, you're almost at the point of self-parody. I would rename the site to "The Slowest Authority on Tech" -
wtfxxxgp For once I must agree that THW has dropped the ball on a very important phone review - it was too late - and the "better late than never" gesture never applies to a Review of something. My sister has just purchased this phone a week ago, had I had sight of a THW review then I'm sure I could have convinced her to rather wait for the next model that would surely have better support for that gorgeous screen - I played with it, it really is amazing watching video on that thing.Reply -
zodiacfml It's quite late and learned little except the voice activated shutter feature. Most of the information are subjective and benchmarks are quite of little use since the database is quite few.Reply
Tom's, here is a suggestion. Since you're good with gaming benchmarks, why not just make reviews of smartphones as portable gaming machines? There's plenty of information to be gathered from such and plenty of debates/discussion could be created just from that.
Build a database of old games and phones to be compared to new devices. Higher benchmark numbers encourages upgrades (*wink*). -
Cryio Absolutely no Lumia in the photo shoot comparison? I thought. A Lumia 1020 or Lumia 930 with Denim should have photo sampling comparisons in the next list. Also an iPhone 6+.Reply -
bujcri Suprised not to be mentioned about LG's Lollipop update for LG G3. At least worth mentioning that this update pretty much ruined some funtions on G3 like silent mode (now DND) and brought a lot of useless notifications on lockscreen like for example whatever you wanna have permanently on the notification bar (I used to have the date there). In a nutshell I really hate Lollipop.Reply -
kiniku I sold this phone on Ebay and bought a Sony Xperia Z3. I went from 8-10 hours of battery life to 48+, brighter screen, water resistant, and amazing sound.Reply -
glasssplinter I had to look at this article several times to confirm that you really just published this. New phone models are just around the corner and you're barely pushing this article out. Why did you feel the need to compare so many features to crapple tech also? The whole reason I'm interested in the phone is because it isn't crapple so people don't care how it stacks up. We want to know how it compares to other android phones. It's like putting the newest icrap review out and then saying but the icrap 10 still doesn't have a removable battery but this android and windows phone does in some hope of swaying them. Tom's has hit new lows...you would have been better off just not publishing this.Reply -
MobileEditor Man! I can't wait for the new Samsung Galaxy S4 review!
Don't buy it. Review done :)
- Matt H.