iPhone 4S - Is it now behind the times?

sarge78 said:
Yep, they're all years behind :rolleyes:

The SGS3 could even out muscle the Vita.
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You picked a benchmark where the 4S is being capped by vsync. Also the MSM8960 and HTC One S are both running at a lower resolution than the 4S in that test.

I do agree that the new GPU's aren't that far behind anymore, but for the sake fairness wanted to point that out.

Here's another benchmark with both the 4S and MSM8960, this time GLBenchmark Pro with no vsync and at 720p:
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So as you can see, a single benchmark never tells the whole story.
 
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The Vita GPU should be around twice as fast since it has twice as many same GPU's as the iPhone 4s. :p

v0n said:
People looking for "openness" is a very small margin though. And in a way, the "open" factor, after some time, works against it, rather than for it.

I was Android fan for a long time. Couldn't imagine switching to something like IOS that didn't have proper multitasking, or even basic features like a quick wifi, 3G and bluetooth toggle on home screen. And then - as "douchy" as it will sound - I got to the point where my life got really busy and mobile communication became in professional terms really serious matter, and I had a very, very little time to constantly play around with half baked flashes that would often leave my phone semi screwed until next patch for days, randomly crashing overclocked features, sometimes laggy governors not waking up the phone quick enough etc. What I took for granted in android platform became a bit of a chore, required constant maintenance, attention. I could no longer allow my phone to lose a text message thread or crash while answering call. If my call was accidentally dropped I could no longer trust that it wasn't because of a kernel module that some student working via forum form a dorm in Prague borrowed in the middle of the night, from a semi working Singapore rom made for a completely different phone, for his custom compilation of what is, on a best of its days, a beta OS anyway.

I realised that until I am able to tweak and customise, I will always tweak and customise. And that tweaking and customising will always lead to seldom, minor, but definite instability of what was, at the end of the day, no longer just casual and social communication tool. And I will regret it. So I moved to IOS. It's fast enough out of the box. It's got enough apps out of the box. It does most of the things, good enough, out of the box. Cannot tweak it therefore cannot break it or make it unstable. Works well ever since I switched. Many things work better, as it's a 100% match between hardware and software. Camera for example, no more lagging, no more searching for better app, no more hunting for focus when reading barcodes, point, 1 second, done. No more car bluetooth loosing sync with the phone after few hours. No more card cleanups, corruptions, repartitionings and running fscks before updates - there is no card, there is no problem. No more worrying if the next update will soft brick the phone. So on, so forth.
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Seems like you were your own downfall here. As far as I can see, it would be solved by buying a Nexus device in the future.
 
sarge78 said:
Yep, they're all years behind :rolleyes:

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The SGS3 could even out muscle the Vita.
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Role your eyes as much as you like but what you just posted proves what I said is correct. We have a wide range of Tegra 3 benchmarks over many apps and on average it’s very far behind. In the best benchmarks like the one you posted its still behind by a lot.

How can you say the SGS3 can out muscle the Vita? I have seen no evidence the SgS3 even approaches half the speed of Vita.

Tegra 3 is no where near powerfull enough to play the same games with the same effects. That is one reason why the best looking games never got ported across.
 
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Before there is a bigger circlejerk on whether my GPU is faster than your GPU, I will point out:

How many games are there that would need that kind of processing power?
How many people are out there actually play those games?
How often do people play games on their phones?

tl;dr: Buy a Vita :p
 
Locke said:
Before there is a bigger circlejerk on whether my GPU is faster than your GPU, I will point out:

How many games are there that would need that kind of processing power?
How many people are out there actually play those games?
How often do people play games on their phones?

tl;dr: Buy a Vita :p
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A few games already and if more people had better hardware we would have more games that use this power. This is why Tegra is so bad, as its so far behind its holding back the market and holding back games. Now that more companys are abandoning Tegra we should start to see better games on Android and one reason many of the best games never get ported to Android is due to Tegra not haveing the power.

How many people play high graphic games on mobiles, well thats millions and for many hours.

EDIT: It’s not just about games anymore with the GPU. The upcomeing big push in mobiles will be to use the GPU as compute device for all suitable apps like editing photos. That will extends battery life and increases speed.
 
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I don't necessarily think hardware is a bone of contention, though the only things that annoy me about using an iPhone is the lack of a SD slot and smaller screen size.

Each person has their own use case and preference, and this argument will never end.

I will make use of having a phone, tablet, laptop and PC, as for me, I find it ineffective to try and do everything on one device. I don't care if my SGSII can output 3D at xx fps, when I play games on my phone the most advanced I get is "Wheres the water" or "Cut the rope", I find any 3D game uninspiring on a small screen, and will prefer to play on my plasma or PC.
 
Robbo said:
I'd rather charge 5 times a day than have to suffer a rubbish old Nokia purely out of stubbornness. ;)

In the event he's away from a charging area for more than 3 days he can easily fix that with a spare battery/charging pack.

Plus, there's no definition of use there either, quite a few phones can go 3 days under fairly light use.
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And thanks to the micro-usb standardisation, anywhere there is a usb port, there is power, and without the need for the plug part that made chargers bulky, just a simple cable and you are good to go. Hell, I managed to charge my phone from the usb port on one of those instant-print photo machines you get in Boots/Tesco/etc. :D
 
NuclearWinter said:
You picked a benchmark where the 4S is being capped by vsync. Also the MSM8960 and HTC One S are both running at a lower resolution than the 4S in that test.

I do agree that the new GPU's aren't that far behind anymore, but for the sake fairness wanted to point that out.

Here's another benchmark with both the 4S and MSM8960, this time GLBenchmark Pro with no vsync and at 720p:
44387.png


So as you can see, a single benchmark never tells the whole story.
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Well the One X is actually 720p which makes it a higher resolution phone than the 4S. 50% more pixels in fact while the frame rates are only 58 vs 51 in favour of the 4S. Where have you seen it is due to vsync?

Also you'll notice that that PRO graph was done ages ago while now Krait is doing better on more mature drivers.

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Pottsey said:
Even Tergra 3 is way behind the GPU in the Iphone 4s. It could be a long whle before Andorid phones catch up.
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Just plain wrong. Adreno 225 in Krait is very good.
 
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anyon said:
Well the One X is actually 720p which makes it a higher resolution phone than the 4S. 50% more pixels in fact while the frame rates are only 58 vs 51 in favour of the 4S. Where have you seen it is due to vsync?
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I think you're missing the point, which is that benchmarks can be cherry picked to show misleading results. In this case the graph posted by the OP was largely meaningless at showing 4S performance because it was capped by vsync being turned on, as mentioned by Anandtech where the benchmarks are taken from.

Also you'll notice that that PRO graph was done ages ago while now Krait is doing better on more mature drivers.
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It was from 6 days ago, and I didn't use the newer one because it's using a newer version of the benchmark and I don't know what (if any) effect that has on the scores (there isn't a 4S score with the newer one).

But again, the point was that posting a single graph is misleading. I specifically said that I agree they aren't that far behind the 4S, but that in fairness I felt it should be pointed out that graph quoted is misleading.
 
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From what Anand says in his preview the 225 was installed so that Qualcomm could get the SoC out quickly and it's mainly the die shrink and hence massively increased clock speed causing it to trade blows with the PowerVR chipset. Will be interesting to see how the Adreno 3xx series with Krait performs when released.
 
I have an iphone 4S after having a 3GS for 2 years. I'm really happy with it but get an upgrade in December. I think unless the Iphone 5 is quite a bit better/different then I might try something else. Especially as my 4S will only be 11 months old so it wouldn't be a complete disaster if I went back to it. In terms of screen size, well I would like a bigger screen but I think 4.3" might be slightly too big, not sure. There's 2 things that put me off going for a bigger screen. Whenever I've moved to a bigger TV or bigger monitor, there's no going back and also the wow factor only lasts about a week.
 
Performance wise it's still up there. The thing that it's losing is the buzz and hype. Everyone has one these days and they just look a bit boring. The last 2 have been the same design and it's no longer as iconic as it once was.

This will all change of course when the iPhone 5 is released.

The other thing is that other manufacturers have stepped up and are producing devices that actually compete with the iphone which didn't happen for the first few versions.
 
I see my SGS2 as a portable computer, so I prefer the larger screen of that, and of course of larger Android offerings yet to come. If I splashed out on a tablet though, I wouldn't appreciate the SGS2 as much, so I've refrained from buying a tablet and I use a laptop and desktop for my larger computing needs.
 
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