Samsung Galaxy S5 vs LG G2: Life in the fast lane

Synthetic benchmarks

The Samsung Galaxy S5 comes with a better chipset in the face of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. It's the same four Krait 400 cores and Adreno 330 GPU as in the Snapdragon 800, which powers the LG G2, but both are clocked higher to make 801 MSM8974AC the most powerful Snapdragon chip currently in use.

The LG flagship has four cores clocked at 2.26 GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU that goes as high as 450 MHz per core. The RAM handling tops at 1600 MHz for the 2 GB preinstalled. The Galaxy S5 has four Krait 400 cores at 2.5 GHz each and GPU cores with up to 578 MHz with RAM using up to 1866 MHz.

What these numbers indicate is a theoretical speed bump in the Galaxy S5. Hardware aside, there are software optimizations too that can further increase the lead. But enough introduction, let's look at the numbers.

UPDATE: We re-tested the LG G2 since its KitKat update to see how the device handles benchmarks. We did the same for the battery score, which can be seen on page 3 of this review. But to further clarify the difference we will add the Jelly Bean G2 scores alongside the KitKat's.

BenchmarkPi and Linpack focus on CPU performance. BenchmarkPi gauges the performance of each individual core while Linpack tests multi-threaded performance. In each benchmark the Galaxy S5 scored better than the LG G2.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  99
• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  128
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  158

Linpack

Higher is better

• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  1054
• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  992
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  749

GeekBench 3, AnTuTu 4 and Quadrant test everything about the hardware rig, from CPU to graphics to read/write performance. All three benchmarks show the Galaxy S5 a clear winner, by some distance, again.

GeekBench 3

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  3011
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  2403
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  2243

AnTuTu 4

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  36018
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  35444
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  29928

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  25044
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  19815
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  19160

Next comes graphic performance where the Galaxy S5 should have an edge and it shows. The off-screen GFXBench tests (those that squeeze the raw potential of the GPU when it doesn't need to push its native pixels) put the Adreno 300 in the Galaxy S5 on top.

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  27.8
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  22.4
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  22.2

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  11.8
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  8.6
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  8.5

Set at high quality in Epic Citadel, the LG G2 was able to claim its first win by 4 frames per second.

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

• LG G2 (KitKat)
  57.7
• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  53.7
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  51.4

Basemark X is Rightware's gaming benchmark that tests graphics and CPU performance, while Basemark OS II tests just about every facet of your phone's performance. It's exactly here that manufacturers used to heavily cheat, so we ran an anti-cheat version that should've kept any trickery out. In honesty, none of the contenders attempted any and the results saw the Galaxy S5 as the clear winner in both tests.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (regular)
  11869
• Galaxy S5 (anti-cheat)
  11759
• LG G2 (KitKat) (anti-cheat)
  9975
• LG G2 (KitKat) (regular)
  9924

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (anti-cheat)
  1060
• Galaxy S5 (regular)
  1032
• LG G2 (KitKat) (anti-cheat)
  862
• LG G2 (KitKat) (regular)
  846

Finally we come to browsing performance. We're using two renowned benchmarks for this purpose. SunSpider is focused on JavaScript performance while BrowserMark II looks at the HTML 5 performance. The winner, again, is undisputed and it is the Galaxy S5.

SunSpider 1.0.2

Lower is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  379
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  549
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  902

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801)
  3529
• LG G2 (KitKat)
  2885
• LG G2 (Jelly Bean)
  2718

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S5. So in terms of performance newer is better, and that's hardly a revelation. The Snapdragon 801 proved its superiority over the Snapdragon 800 but, looking at the scores, we can't really say the difference is dramatic. The Galaxy S5 was able to secure wins on just about every test we performed by just enough to call it comfortable but when actually using both devices side by side, we wouldn't call the loser a slouch.