Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from last fall beat this year's top Android flagship phones in a series of raw performance benchmarks. However, despite often having a pixel resolution advantage, Android phones also typically deliver worse looking graphics on top of being slower, as revealed by GameBench.
Back in April, AppleInsider detailed graphics performance of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus against Samsung's Galaxy S5, S6 and Note 4 (detailed above).
Shortly afterward, gaming-oriented benchmarks firm GameBench performed its own video games evaluation of iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6, as well as Google's Nexus 6 and the HTC One M9, evaluating median frame per second performance while playing a variety of different types of games from various developers.
Overall, those tests showed that Apple's iPhone 6 performed best in terms of median FPS as well as in the minimum FPS achieved during testing. iPhone 6 also scored best in "FPS stability," a measurement of how well the device could sustain high performance gameplay.
The firm's full report also detailed that "iPhone games use around a quarter of the RAM of the Android games we tested," highlighting the fallacy of comparing hardware numbers alone, or
raw benchmarks without any context or sanity checks.
In our own testing, we have consistently found that iOS devices not only outperform their Android counterparts, but do so using less RAM and lower CPU clock rates.
Being faster while using less hardware indicates that Apple's iOS software (along with the platform's third party apps) is better optimized, which also helps iOS devices to claim better battery life on smaller, thinner devices.
What about screen resolution?
Android fans are often quick to blame poor graphics performance on the higher resolution screens that many Android phones use. This is partly correct: as we have frequently noted before, Samsung's use of extremely high resolution screens — paired with relatively anemic processors — is a primary reason why its high end devices perform more like basic gear, despite Galaxy S6 having a retail price higher than iPhone 6.
However, to get around the engineering flaw of too many pixels and not enough GPU horsepower, many game developers scale down Android graphics to the point where games look no better or sometimes even worse, in addition to being slower overall, as GameBench notes in its latest report on iPhone 6 Plus and Galaxy S6.
As the site observed, "does the Galaxy S6 even offer a perceptibly higher resolution during gameplay? From what we can tell, it usually does not: it appears to upscale games from 1080p or, in some instances even 720p, to the point where our testers really couldn't tell much difference."
GameBench testing revealed that the same games can perform differently on iOS and Android, depending on how well optimized their code is, whether the developer chooses to set a maximum frame rate (which limits quality but enhances the frame rate stability of the game), and what resolution and rendering quality level the developer sets for the title.
For example, in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas , GameBench found that while game frame rate and resolution appeared similar across iPhone 6, 6 Plus and Android devices, it wasn't a matter of Samsung being 'faster but held back by its higher screen resolution.'
Instead, to achieve compatible performance with iOS, the quality of graphics was scaled back on Android, something that isn't apparent when looking at benchmarks but is visible when looking at GameBench's comparative screenshots .
iPhone 6
Galaxy S6
Despite a higher resolution, Galaxy S6 graphics lack detail.
Source: GameBench
