Antutu & DxOMark: Does Phone Benchmark Ranking Really Matter

By Carrie Tsai,  Last Updated: August 23, 2019

Nowadays, with the development of smartphones, many people pay more and more attention to the hardware of mobile phone. We may also heard of antutu benchmark. What does it mean? What are the factors affecting the cell phone benchmark? Can it tell everything about a phone?

What are Antutu and DxOMark and Benchmark

Antutu Benchmark is a professional software for rating mobile phones and tablets of iOS and Android devices.

It can conduct a series of hardware evaluations on your mobile phone and tablet including battery power, screen highlights and multi-touch so that you can get the hardware information in a more direct way.

By doing so, you can be more familiar with your mobile phone and know whether there is a problem with hardware. For instance, the battery detection can test whether it is stable and normal during the usage, while the multi-touch detection allows you to ensure that the mobile phone can meet your requirement of favourite games.

In recent years, DxOMark has gradually become known to the public. To put it simply, DxOMark is the world leading imaging evaluation agency. Their early work focused on testing the performance of professional camera bodies and lenses, and using numbers to quantify performance.

However, after the rise of smart phones, their business scope has also increased accordingly, adding the evaluation scores of smart phone front and rear cameras. In addition to using data to visualize the performance of cameras on smartphones, DxOMark will work with handset manufacturers to provide some recommendations for imaging optimization.

The principle behind the smartphone benchmark

The basic way to test cell phone benchmarks is to let the device repeatedly handle a large number of tasks or a single complex task to test the difference in computing efficiency in varying devices, which gave birth to some Android benchmark apps such as Antutu and Greenbench using sophisticated algorithms to test the performance of the phone.

Simply put, the testing process is actually to fully bring out the performance of each hardware so as to get the comprehensive score of the cell phone, which is the equivalent of motor bike revving at full throttle.

By principle, it is not advisable to do this but it is only for the purpose of measuring the performance of mobile phone and solely operating for a short time, so theoretically it will not cause so much damage to the hardware as you might think and the temporary overheat is nothing to worry about.

The factors affecting the benchmark score

Antutu benchmark score can be explained by a combination of factors, which are UX(multitask  and runtime), CPU(CPU integer and float-point, single-thread integer and single thread float-point), and RAM(RAM operation and speed) and GPU(2D graphics and 3D graphics).

There is an animation in the opening to test the CPU and GPU performance, and through the animation can test whether your phone supports shadow rendering 2k, the number of frames.

The scores of CPU and GPU can be gained by a series of indicators. The memory speed can be tested by reading and writing files in a certain period of time. Since Antutu owns the wold largest database of user test scores, we can be confident to judge the true performance of a device.

Is benchmark score everything?

There is no doubt that Antutu is currently the highly regarded benchmark app in Android field. Not only the users use it for testing their own phone, but also manufacturers are willing to show the powerful performance of their flagship products.

There is a growing belief that the higher the score, the better it is. In fact, however, it is not the case, we should also take other factors into account when it comes to the overall performance.

Take heat radiation for example. Due to the short time of Antutu benchmark testing-only a few minutes-so only the extreme performance can be tested while the average performance is hard to measured.

Heat radiation plays an important role in determining the performance of a smartphone. A mobile phone with poor heat dissipation will cause overheat and frequency reduction, thus leading to the poor performance. The specific decline of performance depends on the severity of the overheat and a 70% drop is also possible.

Since the heat dissipation is mainly passive because there is no structure such as a fan or water cooling. Therefore, the size and material of the phone will determine the efficiency of heat radiation. The larger the phone is, the bigger the volume of dissipation. In the prospect of material, mental is better than glass.

Besides, before running the Antutu test, whether being switch to the Performance Mode (often set in the battery or energy-saving options), or having other apps run in the background, or being charged (which can also cause the frequency reduction), all can influence the final score of Antutu benchmark.

The score will varies under different situation so you may find that the actual benchmark score of many Android phones often fail to reach the one in manufacturers’ promotion campaign.

As a matter of fact, since Samsung Exynos and Huawei’s Kirin processors are mainly supplied internally , other brands of Android phone will either choose Qualcomm or join the camp of Media Tek.

Given that the choices of processors are limited, even different brands and models of mobile phones will have the same theoretical performance, not to mention some manufactures can take the advantage of the bug of benchmark apps, so the meaning of benchmark scores will gradually fade out.

Benchmark score is NOTHING actually

Why do technological products highlight technical attributes? Perhaps the number is the best carrier. To a certain extent, Benchmarks has become the most intuitive comparison tool for consumers to purchase mobile phones. For example, the high-density mobile phone with higher benchmarks has stronger performance, and the mobile phone with higher battery life is more durable. With benchmarks, consumers can find products that meet their needs at a glance.

The most obvious stage of Benchmarks role is in the early development of smart phones. At that time, the network information was not developed enough. The products must highlight the main selling point in the process of communication, and the "digital" tool is the most penetrating. Most importantly, in addition to the performance advantages of the smartphone at the time, the product itself did not have much selling point.

But now it's different, there are too many selling points on the smartphone. Screen fingerprints, no bangs full screen, high speed fast charge, etc. These selling points can not be measured by "Benchmarks", but they can bring about obvious experience improvement. Because of this, the importance of the mobile phone chip's running link has gradually been diluted by manufacturers. In the past, it may take an hour to talk about benchmarks. Now it is just a pass.

DxOMark and Antutu Benchmarks scores may be just symbolic in the end.

It should be good for manufacturers and consumers. Desalination of the deliberate pursuit of running points means that manufacturers do not have to invest huge resources to carry out targeted debugging to meet the running test, but can start to solve the actual effect of product functions.

At the same time, it also a manifestation of the consumer's maturity and return to rationality. Consumers from the past "only score theory" to the current focus on product integration, rational consumers will put higher demands on mobile phone manufacturers.

Therefore when we take a serious look at smartphones again, rather than focusing on the benchmark score, we should switch attention to the feel of holding, the rationality of UI structure, security and features. It is believed that the benchmark scores will be secondary to overall user experience in the future of samrtphone battlefield.