LG G5 vs Samsung Galaxy S7: A rebel and a stunner

Performance

Qualcomm's stumble last year brought a lot of headaches to phone makers, including LG, which chose to go with the second-best Snapdragon 808 for both the G4 and V10.

This year, the chip designer redeemed itself in a big way with the Snapdragon 820, which offers excellent performance and LG jumped on it.

Samsung had a backup - the Exynos division - and last year Galaxy S6 and Note5 had the best chipset on Android by a large margin. This year, the company pressed on and introduced new in-house CPU cores - four of them, replacing the cores in the "big" cluster (what would have been A57/A72 otherwise). The "little" cluster is still made up of four A53 cores.

In the US, the Samsung Galaxy S7 packs S820. We had the Exynos 8890 version for testing, but we've included scores from an S820-powered S7 edge, which should have a similar performance to the non-edge version.

Both phones have 4GB of RAM and with a similarly performing chipset, we can expect both flagships to be close in overall performance.

AnTuTu 6 gives the LG G5 a tiny lead while Basemark OS 2.0 handed the victory to the Galaxy S7 duo (with Snapdragon ahead of Exynos).

AnTuTu 6

Higher is better

• LG G5
  134541
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  132849
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  132084

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  2352
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  2128
• LG G5
  2065

Delving into more detail on processor performance, the Snapdragon has a clear advantage. No surprise here, since Qualcomm went with only four cores arranged in a 2+2 big.LITTLE cluster, but they are more powerful than their counterparts in the 4+4 setup of the Exynos.

GeekBench 3 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  2345
• LG G5
  2328
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  2170

The difference isn't that large, though, and the higher numbers of the Exynos chipset pull ahead in multi-core tests. While some apps make the best of all cores available (even browser like Chrome), others get a bigger boost of the "few but powerful" CPU design.

GeekBench 3 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S7
  6360
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  5420
• LG G5
  5362

Moving on to the GPU, there Samsung still uses reference designs from ARM - Mali-T880 in particular, with 12-cores. Qualcomm has an in-house design team that pumps out Adreno GPUs.

In all tests, it seems that, surprisingly, it's the Snapdragon 820-based Galaxy S7 edge that comes out on top (usually by 1-2 frames per second). The Exynos version comes in third and the S820-powered LG G5 splits the two pretty equally.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  49
• LG G5
  47
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  38

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  29
• LG G5
  28
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  27

GFX 3.1 Car scene (offscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  18
• LG G5
  16
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  15

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  10
• LG G5
  8.8
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  7.9

We expected the Snapdragons to stick together, but that's not the case. Switching to a different benchmark, Basemark ES 3.1 Metal, puts the Exynos-based S7 on top, but the LG G5 again lags slightly behind the S820 S7.

Basemark X is a third data point showing that the Adreno inside the Galaxy S7 performs better than that inside the G5.

Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S7
  732
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  624
• LG G5
  587

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S7
  32345
• Galaxy S7 edge (Snapdragon)
  32160
• LG G5
  29456

Innovation: Both Qualcomm and Samsung are doing custom CPU designs, which will create some competition compared to last year when standard ARM designs were used by both (it's just that Samsung won thanks to a more advanced manufacturing process).

Refinement: Samsung needs a great deal of GPU performance since VR is so demanding (and the Gear VR was a big part of S7's launch). Both phones have the fastest mobile GPUs available.

Winner: Tie. The difference between the two is small enough for you to probably not notice much of a difference.