Tech

Performance preview: The Moto X sports a great GPU, respectable CPU

We kick the tires of the Snapdragon at the heart of Motorola’s new phone.

Andrew Cunningham – Aug 1, 2013 3:15 pm | 82

A rosewood-backed Moto X. Credit: Casey Johnston

If you’ve read our hands-on preview of Google and Motorola’s new Moto X, you’ll already know that the phone is pretty similar to the new Droid Ultra that Verizon announced last week. This observation extends to the phone’s internals—the Moto X uses the same “X8 computing system” that the Droids do.

As we noted at the time, Google and Motorola’s announcement of the X8 was less-than-straightforward. What was sold as some sort of custom eight-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) has actually turned out to be a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip married to what are apparently separate “contextual computing processor” and “natural language processor” units.

What those two extra units do is still a bit mysterious, and it’s something we hope to figure out as we spend more time with the phone. In the meantime, we thought we’d take a quick look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that will be driving most of the action here (part number MSM8960DT, according to CPU-Z), since it’s a configuration we haven’t seen before: it takes the Adreno 320 GPU from the quad-core Snapdragon S4 and Snapdragon 600s that we’ve been seeing in high-end Android phones since late last year, and marries it to a dual-core CPU more similar to the Snapdragon S4 Plus and Snapdragon 400 chips shipping in mid-range phones today.

The GPU: Definitely high-end

To test the GPU, we turn to the GFXBench 2.7 test. For the uninitiated, there are two different versions of this test: the “onscreen” test that runs at the phone’s native display resolution and the “offscreen” test that renders all scenes at 1080p regardless of the phone’s resolution. The offscreen tests are good for measuring the raw horsepower of a particular GPU, while the onscreen tests are more representative of what you can expect when running actual games on the phone.

We’ll be comparing three phones to the Moto X. The Samsung Galaxy S 4 will give us some idea of how Motorola’s phone compares to the best that other OEMs are currently offering. The Galaxy S III is here to show how it compares to high-end phones from early last year (including the previous-generation Droid Razr HD) and mid-range phones from today (like the HTC One Mini). Finally, there’s the Nexus 4, which, as the most recent Nexus reference phone from Google, is a handy reference point in any Android phone comparison.

Moto X and Galaxy S 4 are running Android 4.2.2. Galaxy S III is running Android 4.1.1. Nexus 4 is running Android 4.3.

The Moto X’s Adreno 320 GPU stacks up very favorably to the same GPU in the Snapdragon 600 used in the Galaxy S 4—they’re roughly comparable, and I would attribute the small differences seen in the apples-to-apples offscreen tests to software optimizations. Both are slightly faster than the Adreno 320 in the older Snapdragon S4 Pro, and much faster than the Adreno 225 in last year’s Galaxy S III.

When playing games at the phone’s 1280×720 resolution, you should actually get better framerates than you do from the S 4’s 1920×1080 display (as the onscreen results show). Even if this Snapdragon isn’t a top-of-the-line SoC, it’s nice to see that Motorola and Google haven’t skimped on graphics performance.

The CPU: Down two cores, but still good enough

Flagship Android phones from Samsung, HTC, LG, and Sony have all been outfitted with quad-core CPUs from Qualcomm in the last year, but the Moto X (and the high-end Droids) both stick with dual-core CPUs. This isn’t an issue, really—a pair of Qualcomm’s CPU cores are still pretty good, and peak power consumption may even fall a bit as a result—but if you absolutely need the fastest phone you can get for $199 on-contract, the Moto X isn’t it.

All browser tests performed in the latest version of Chrome for Android.

The interesting thing about some of these scores is that the difference in clock speed between the Snapdragon S4 Plus and the Moto X’s SoC—from 1.5 to 1.7GHz—is only 13.3 percent, but the difference in some of these scores is larger than that (something nearer to 25 percent, most of the time). The phone reportedly includes Qualcomm’s Krait 300 CPU architecture as opposed to the Krait 200 (née Krait) in the Snapdragon S4 Plus. The part number is what you need to pay attention to here—there’s an MSM8960T that combines an Adreno 320 with two Krait 200 cores, but that extra D in MSM8960DT apparently denotes a similar chip with a new CPU architecture.

At any rate, despite having two fewer cores, the Moto X does fairly well compared to the Galaxy S 4. Its browser benchmark scores in particular may be a sign that Chrome has been optimized specifically for the Moto X, since they’re all as good or better than the S 4s—being owned by Google has to have some benefit for Motorola, right?

Not exceptional, but a step in a good direction

I’ll echo what we said in our hands-on with the Moto X: this is a fine phone, but we’re ultimately left wondering what the fuss is about. It’s plenty fast, if not exceptionally so. It has a few neat software tweaks, but nothing that would prompt us to throw our Galaxies or Nexuses in the trash. It starts at a same-old-same-old $199 on-contract price just like most flagship Android phones. Customizable backs are all well and good, but if that’s your phone’s killer feature, you might need to think of some more ideas.

That being said, this is just the first charge in Motorola’s latest attempt to reinvent itself, and neither the specs nor a few hours of hands-on time are enough to paint an entire picture. Everything from the amount of buzz the phone has seen in the Android enthusiast press to the ad budget that Google and Motorola ultimately decide to dedicate to the device can be a factor in its success. Google and Motorola don’t need to deliver a knockout blow to Samsung or Apple or anyone else with the Moto X—first, they just need to stem the bleeding.

Listing image: Casey Johnston

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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