In terms of performance and computing power, smartphones have come a long way since their inception. With the growing number of users who rely more and more on their device in their daily life and work, the demand for higher computing power has also increased dramatically.
Most Android flagships today come with 8-core processors and plenty of RAM. Despite the impressive power of these smartphones, you have probably come across an additional high performance mode that supposedly helps to improve the device even more.
Below we will take a closer look at this feature and try to figure out whether the phone will actually run faster in high performance mode.
What is the essence of the function?
While not much is known in detail about how a smartphone’s high performance mode actually works, a few educated guesses can be made. First of all, it should increase the performance of the processor, both central and graphic, to the highest possible level available on a particular device.
With the ability to install custom ROMs and root, multiple cores will eventually overclock your phone’s processor, squeezing its potential to the last drop. But since some manufacturers have started to provide this feature by default, it’s safe to assume that it doesn’t actually overclock your device, which would be risky.
What really helps to boost performance is the mundane things like choosing high performance cores and running the CPU at full power for short periods to avoid overheating. This mode also helps speed up the game by pausing other background tasks.
In fact, it does not unlock any hidden features of your smartphone, however, it can significantly improve the quality of the gameplay if you have a lot of background tasks running.
How to turn it on?
At the time of writing, the high performance mode can be found on smartphones of only a few companies. These include Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo and Realme. However, access to this option may vary slightly depending on the device model. Most often, the switch is located in the battery settings.
For example, if you have a OnePlus smartphone running OxygenOS, go to “Settings”click “Battery”then – “Advanced settings” and press the high performance mode switch. Since the operating system of the ColorOS version uses a similar codebase, accessing this option on Oppo and Realme phones will be similar.
Does this mode really work?
It’s great that smartphone manufacturers are starting to give their consumers access to power user features, but does high performance mode really work as it should? We tested it in practice, observing the performance in benchmarks, the quality of games, and how the device behaves in everyday use.
Testing was conducted on a OnePlus 9RT smartphone. Since they were used daily, any changes in performance would be very noticeable. The device is equipped with a Snapdragon 888 processor and an Adreno 660 GPU. The RAM is 12 GB. All these are characteristics of a high-end smartphone.
Benchmark results
For a more technical and detailed review, testing was conducted in Geekbench 5 and AnTuTu benchmarks before and after enabling high performance mode.
While benchmarks are the easiest way to assess the performance of a smartphone, remember that their numbers are relative. Test scores tend to be influenced by many factors, which is why even phones with the same processor sometimes produce different numbers.
We ran both benchmarks on the same smartphone with high battery levels, allowing the device to cool down a bit between tests.
Geekbench 5 is a reliable testing tool that calculates the single-core and multi-core performance of your phone.
With the high performance mode enabled, the single-core score increased significantly, but, oddly enough, this led to a decrease in the performance of the multi-core processor. This is quite natural, since all the power of your device is focused only on the current task, ignoring unnecessary background processes.
Benchmark AnTuTu evaluates various indicators, including the performance of the central and graphic processor, the amount of memory, and much more. The test result is similar. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) score remained the same, but the GPU (graphics processing unit) score increased significantly.
Game test
As interesting as the benchmark results are, they don’t reflect the real picture. Most of them load the processor only during their launch, but gaming sessions can last for hours.
We’ve run some of the most graphics-intensive games with and without high performance mode enabled, but the results have not lived up to expectations. With both Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact, smooth gameplay was only seen for the first 30 minutes, after which frames began to drop in the latter. That is, the included high performance mode did not help.
As we understood, the performance in games falls to a greater extent due to the automatic throttling of the processor, which avoids overheating, and not due to insufficient power. High performance mode could improve the gaming experience on budget devices, but so far only more expensive smartphones have been endowed with this option.
Daily use
In everyday use of the smartphone, including browsing social networks, taking photos and sometimes working in several applications, the high performance mode did not show any obvious changes.
As noted above, flagship models can handle moderate to heavy workloads on their own without any problems. The feature was on all day, and the only thing we noticed was the battery drained a little faster.
Finally
After all the testing we’ve done, our verdict is that high performance mode is a redundant option on flagship devices considering how well these smartphones perform on their own. Yes, the benchmarks showed better results, but there were no improvements in everyday use and games. It would be great to test such a feature on more budget devices, where it could really be useful, but manufacturers are not in a hurry to implement it yet.
If you have chosen a device with suitable characteristics for yourself, you can not focus on the high performance mode. It’s just a new option, so its absence shouldn’t bother you.
Based on materials www.makeuseof.com
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