Results: Battery And Throttling
Basemark OS II Full (Anti-Detection)
The Basemark OS II battery test scores are derived by repeatedly running the devices until enough data has been collected to determine the drain rate of the device.
Of the two WQHD devices, the Note 4, with a 7% larger battery and slightly larger screen, manages to score 11% better than the G3. It’s not a big difference, but also not insignificant considering the Snapdragon 805 in the Note 4 offers better performance on the same 28nm HPm process as the 801 in the G3.
The iPhone 6 Plus and its smaller 2906mAh battery scores 35% better than the G3 with a 3000mAh battery. The 3610mAh battery in the Oppo N1 helps it score well, despite its slower Snapdragon 600 SoC and less-optimized 28nm LP process.
BatteryXPRT 2014
Unfortunately, we couldn’t collect any data for BatteryXPRT 2014. The test repeatedly crashed on the G3 and never ran to completion.
GFXBench 3.0 Corporate
GFXBench's battery test measures battery life and performance stability by logging frame and battery discharge rate as the on-screen T-Rex test runs for 30 consecutive iterations. The results are given in two scores: estimated battery life in minutes and the number of frames rendered on the slowest test run (to gauge if a device is throttling).
The G3 falls behind the Galaxy S5 and Note 4 in battery life, but still lasts a reasonable 3.3 hours.
If we only look at the battery life chart, we might conclude that the G3 is superior to the iPhone 6 Plus. However, the iPhone completes the test at peak performance without any throttling. This, unfortunately, is not the case for the G3.
Average performance over thirty iterations of T-Rex drops to 11 FPS compared to 20 FPS for a single iteration. The diagram below shows how the G3’s performance varies over time.
The G3 is unable to dissipate the heat generated from running the GPU at 100% and has to throttle the GPU clock speed to keep it within its thermal envelope. This is one disadvantage of using an all-plastic construction.