The OnePlus 6T finds itself in a rather weird place as far as internals go. It is based around the still current Snapdragon 845 flagship, but the chip came out fairly early this year. On the one hand, that potentially places it pretty late in its deprecation cycle. Well, not literally, of course, since a flagship chipset remains relevant for at least a few years. But, you still get our point.
On the other hand, and this is the weirder part, the original OnePlus 6 is also based on the same 10nm, Snapdragon 845 silicon. RAM tiers are pretty much unchanged as well, set at 6GB for the entry-level and 8GB for the upper tier. Storage has seen some changes, namely that the base storage variant is now 128GB, not 64GB. Now, the official specs do mention some storage specifics, namely that the UFS 2.1 chips use 2 lanes. What that boils down to is potentially quicker storage speeds, which could affect performance to some degree. We ran a quick benchmark to see just how much of a variance we are looking at, and while the OnePlus 6T has consistently quicker speeds, the difference is not really significant.
Storage speed: OnePlus 6T • OnePlus 6
Other than that, we expect the 8GB, 128GB OnePlus 6T review unit to perform practically identical to our 6GB, 128GB OnePlus 6 in synthetic benchmarks. Both also run OnePlus' signature near-stock build of Android Pie. So, any variance should come from extra RAM alone. And the numbers line up perfectly.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Looking at the pure-CPU test first, we see the 4x2.8 GHz Kryo 385 Gold, plus 4x1.7 GHz Kryo 385 Silver cores inside the Snapdragon 845 perform as expected. We had no issues with thermal management during stress tests either. The OnePlus 6T remains lukewarm to the touch under load.
Higher is better
Basemark ranks the pair of OnePlus devices even closer together. Also, quite noticeable ahead of the Snapdragon 845 pack, due to software optimization alone.
Higher is better
Moving on to AnTuTu and its more compound performance assessment, we can clearly see it's taking notice of the extra 2GB of RAM, compared to the OnePlus 6. Looking at the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1, both also equipped with 8GB of system memory, we can see the benefits of OnePlus' near-stock, lean and well-optimized Android OS at work.
Higher is better
Higher is better
On-screen rendering is where the screen resolution starts to play a major role. The Adreno 630 feels more comfortable rendering at the FullHD+ scale of the OnePlus 6T than the QHD+ on something like the Sony Xperia XZ3.
Higher is better
Higher is better
That being said, it is clear that even the 60 extra rows of 1080 pixels each, that the 19.9:9 OnePlus 6T sports over its predecessor do make a noticeable difference when rendering the same thing in true full-screen. Of course, if you run into any performance trouble or simply can't tolerate the notch digging into your content, there's always the option to hide the notch for certain apps and games.
Higher is better
Basemark X typically offers a more accurate and comparable representation of overall graphical fidelity, and we can see the OnePlus 6T neck to neck with its predecessor.
So, hardware-wise, it should come as no surprise that the OnePlus 6T is just a potent and capable of a flagship as its predecessor. Perhaps the latter might just have a slight edge in some on-screen rendering scenarios if you really insist on using the entire screen to game. However, marketing materials for the OnePlus 6T do mention a rather interesting Smart Boost technology, which we couldn't find any mention of on previous OnePlus phones.
As per its description, it merely takes frequently used apps and stores some of their initialization data in the RAM. This, in turn, enables the promise of 5% to 20% faster cold starts on said apps. Unfortunately, this is really hard to test. Plus, any meaningful data we do acquire could be skewed in the UFS 2.1 storage chips on the new OnePlus 6T do turn out to use one extra data lane for quicker read and write speeds.
Thanks to its clean and light approach to Android, the OnePlus 6T, just like its predecessor, are currently among the snappiest and most optimized devices, running Google's mobile OS.
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