OnePlus 6 Review Part 2: Pocophone F1 Performance Comparison

This post is part of the series OnePlus 6 Review

Other posts in this series:

  1. OnePlus 6 Review Part 1: Premium vibes
  2. OnePlus 6 Review Part 2: Pocophone F1 Performance Comparison (Current)
  3. OnePlus 6 Review Part 3: The small things

Normally I would follow the first part of my review of the OnePlus 6 with a detailed breakdown of its performance as well as a software overview. But this year, Xiaomi has raised all of our eyebrows with a late entry, the Pocophone F1, to the market of the so-called flagship killers. This phone has had me very intrigued that I decided to pit it against its main rival, the OnePlus 6, in a separate test. In this article, we will discuss each phone’s merits and drawbacks in one of the most important aspects of a phone’s performance: UI fluidity, aka “smoothness.”

As with my previous reviews, I’ve collected a series of frame rate charts which plot each frame against the time taken to render it. For 60Hz displays—which all Android smartphones except for a few phones like the Razer phone have—the time to draw each frame must not exceed 16.7ms, which is what the horizontal green line represents. Any frame that takes longer than 16.7ms time to render is considered a dropped frame. One thing to note, the Play Store Fling test has been omitted from the testing procedure. There has been a noticeable inconsistency in the obtained results over several tries, something that we want to stay the farthest from. Without further ado, let’s get started.

OnePlus 6

Pocophone F1

Methodology

  • Google Calendar Fling: A quick fling performed in Schedule view in both ways for 3 times in a row as demonstrated here.
  • Touch Latency: The test was initiated in ‘Ball‘ mode and run for 20 seconds.
  • Scrollable WebView and Notification Shade: A quick fling was performed in both ways for 3 times in a row in each test respectively in UiBench.
  • Every other UiBench test was run for 20 seconds while the data was being collected.

Looking at the Google Calendar Fling test, both phones are neck and neck, though the Pocophone F1 manages to maintain a slightly more consistent frame rate with the frames taking slightly less time to be rendered on average. Not what anyone would call a drastic difference though. Moving on to the EditText Typing test, we don’t see much difference between both phones. So far both phones fare very similarly with the OnePlus 6 struggling to make a case for itself.

Image: Android Beat

However, things look a bit more different in the UiBench tests. Skimming through the General tests, we can easily establish a prominent trend: the OnePlus 6 edges out the F1 in most tests with a lower average frame time, while the Pocophone F1 is more consistent. I still think it drops more frames than it should, given the more than capable hardware under the hood. This pattern is more evident in the Notification Shade test; the OnePlus 6 hits a lower average frame time. Moving on to the Rendering tests, the OnePlus 6 widens the gap and leaves its rival embarrassed. Sadly though, the OnePlus 6 loses nearly all its ground in the Scrollable Webview test, where it drops significantly more frames than the Pocophone F1. That surely left me scratching my head for a while, especially when the results are nearly the same over several trials.

So let’s get to the nitty-gritty stuff. Generally speaking, the OnePlus 6 fares better with respect to animations, dropping fewer frames than its rival. I think this is something a lot of people saw coming, considering how close OxygenOS is to stock Android. Xiaomi’s MIUI still changes a lot of the design elements. But on the other hand, while in pursuit of keeping the frame times as low as possible, the OnePlus 6 tends to be a little bit less consistent than its counterpart. Scrolling busy web pages with lots of text though is shaping up to be a major concern for the OnePlus 6. Overall, it is very tough to call any of these devices a distant second to the other. This is very impressive for the Pocophone F1 indeed, a phone that retails for only $300. It’s also a good example of how speed doesn’t always correspond to smoothness. I would like OnePlus to focus on UI fluidity next time—they certainly nailed the speed part in my opinion.

Plot twist!

You might be already quite surprised with how the Pocophone F1 manages to keep its head high against the OnePlus 6, despite it costing more than $200 less. Well, you might be in for a shock.

Out of pure curiosity, I decided to glance over the graphs of last year’s OnePlus 5T, a phone that was vastly improved after the Android Oreo update in this area. To my surprise, the OnePlus 5T was not only on the same level as this year’s OnePlus 6 and Pocophone F1 but also ahead of them in some tests!

You can view all of the OnePlus 5T’s frame rate charts here.

This was shocking, to say the least. Not to say that the Snapdragon 835 is not a very capable chipset, but newer chipsets should be better than their predecessors even if very slightly. The worst anyone would expect is both chipsets fare similarly. Seeing a noticeable regression is a nasty surprise.

Given how capable the Snapdragon 845 chipset inside is, there is some hope that the upcoming Android Pie update fixes some of these niggles, if not all of them. It is noteworthy that OnePlus isn’t the only one to point fingers at. It could very well be Qualcomm to blame here. After all, OnePlus relies heavily on Qualcomm’s code on the Code Aurora Forums (CAF).

Image: Android Beat

One substantial change Qualcomm has made to their new platform is supporting Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) by default, unlike their past couple of chipsets including the Snapdragon 835 from last year. From my experience with EAS, I have not encountered any performance issues as such, which suggests that it could very well be Qualcomm fiddling with the code to suit their own vision of how their SoC works. Mind you, I have only experienced EAS myself by flashing a custom kernel on my OnePlus 5T which attempts to bring the same EAS experience of the Pixel devices to the OnePlus 5T, which can have its own issues and targets to achieve, as well as its own disparities. It’s developed by two developers in their free time after all and not by a company with more resources and time to dedicate. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is smoother than the default kernel the OnePlus 5T ships with, which by extension means that it is better than what the OnePlus 6 provides out of the box. And if we are going to reference OEM implementations of EAS, Google’s range of Pixel devices all employ EAS and feature unrivaled UI fluidity and snappiness. For what it’s worth, here are the graphs of the OnePlus 5T with the EAS-based custom kernel installed.

Stay tuned for the last part of my OnePlus 6 review where I talk about the phone’s audio, battery life, call quality, and the other “smaller things,” and also where I give you my final verdict.

Featured-Image: Android Authority

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