The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
GPU Performance
Much like the System Performance section, I’m not expecting any big surprises in the GPU performance section. The Kirin 980 uses a Mali G76MP10 at 720MHz and while the chip isn’t blazing as much as the competition, it still performs adequately well and is a significant upgrade to last year’s Kirin 970.
In the 3DMark Sling Shot physics test, the P30s are taking the top spots in terms of performance, both in peak as well as sustained figures. The limitation here lies mainly on the part of the CPU as well as its thermal throttling characteristics. Both the P30 and P30 Pro barely throttle in this regard, at least not in GPU power constrained scenarios.
In the graphics test, we see expected results on the P30 Pro, however on the smaller P30 there’s essentially no thermal throttling at all, which is extremely peculiar.
P30 Overheating Warning & App shutdown
Shockingly enough, I didn’t manage to make the P30 throttle at all in any of the tests, as before it could even get to a point of thermal equilibrium, the OS would shut down the application and raise a thermal overheating warning. I don’t know what’s going on with devices nowadays that this keeps happening as I’ve encountered the issue in last year’s Qualcomm Galaxy S9+ with release firmware as well. The last time this happened, it was due to disabling of the thermal throttling when the OS was detecting benchmarking applications, however in our case we’re using altered application IDs. Still even with this the smaller P30 overheated repeatedly. The fact that this is an OS warning means it’s triggered by a different driver than the usual SoC thermal drivers, so something must be off on the current firmware.
In the GFXBench Vulkan High benchmark we see both P30 and P30 Pro neck-in-neck with quite excellent performance. Again what is interesting here is that both devices perform significantly better than the Mate 20s and the View20 with the same chipset. I explain this through the fact that the P30s come with newer GPU drivers, and Arm must have made more significant improvements in their Vulkan drivers.
In the Normal variant of the Aztec benchmark, we see the P30 Pro throttle a little more, yet it still manages to showcase much better performance figures than the Mate 20, and also higher peak figures than the Mate 20 Pro & View20. The smaller P30 here posts the best figures, however its sustained performance is so high simply because the device is getting extremely hot. I’ve argued if I should be posting the figures for the P30 at all since if you continue to load the device in this manner it’ll simply crash the application.
Overall, GPU performance of the P30s is in line with that of last year’s Snapdragon 845 phones, which is still great. Huawei and HiSilicon still trail behind Samsung’s Exynos Mali GPU implementations, although the difference isn’t all that big this generation.
I hope that Huawei figures out the thermal issues on the smaller P30 and issues a firmware update, I’ll be updating the article with the relevant data once this is all sorted out.
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Quantumz0d - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Good camera review, their auto mode looks good at night but the low light photography in smartphone arena is heavily faked. Be it Google insane algorithm for creating unnatural light or th damn Huawei night mode with HW. I think its too fake and perhaps they do have advantages in some situations but going from a dark room to a lit room is bad in my book.Next up the stupid curved glass copy they did from Samsung needs shaming. Plus its a waste that distortion of image is horrible and the damn construction is weak, see Jerry rig for it.
Then the worst parts - NanoSD ? WTF, please call them out for this, proprietary storages ? That's anti consumer, I use my SGS with 200GB SD card yes the 10Yr old phone with replaced battery and Fat32 works. And same in my iPods and V30S, and it works in PC without any stupid gimmicks or bloat.
Finally Andrei, I know your contribution to Samsung Exynos S9 disaster, it was only possible because it allows Bootloader unlock. That's the most powerful feature of Android and its principles of GNU GPL.
This Huawei junk is blocking access to that officially and in India I read the service centers demand DL for their Honor subsidiary, XDA portal people sold their soul to Huawei and OnePlus now their contract expired for OP and Huawei I guess. This is another massive hole in Huawei devices. I have every doubt about the firmware and SoCs from this CPC company I would really wish to have a Bootloader unlock for all their portfolio subsidiaries and themselves. Its bad, no ownership choice is horrible given how their EMUI blocks lot of stuff and notorious for its control over background processes.
You should include that in your reviews, please.
Thank you.
Quantumz0d - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Also thank you for mentioning the 3.5mm jack and the stupid mono speaker in 2019. LG is Audio champion since a long time and hopefully they will retain that with their top class ESS Sabre implementation moving ahead. Also to note, LG and their new G8 has zero bumps which is a feat along with the Crystal Sound they call. Looking forward for piece.zeeBomb - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
You guys should take a look of MrWhoseTheBoss and his videos about this amazing phone. Such a shame you can't get it in carriers in the Americas, but man oh man.Ian Cutress - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
>You guys should take a look of MrWhoseTheBoss and his videos about this amazing phone.Any specific reason? You haven't exactly said why.
zeeBomb - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link
My bad. Sorry for the late reply too, he talks primarily about the sensor of the P30 Pro and its usefulness in Low Light. Just a suggestion to take a look.bogda - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
I think this statement: "...Huawei continues the senseless design choice of including a headphone jack on the smaller model while skipping it on the larger and more expensive P30 Pro.", makes much more sense if it is changed just a little bit into:"Huawei continues the senseless design choice of skipping a headphone jack on larger and more expensive P30 Pro while including it on the smaller model."
Awful - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Great review but still missing half the picture when it comes to the camera. Time-of-flight sensor? Graduated blur based on depth map? Portrait/face lighting? People are the most photographed and most interesting subjects. Even if it's a mannequin with a wig for repeatability!s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Portrait lighting has been gimmicky for a few generations now. Regarding ToF, IIRC only the Nokia 9 has the proper implementation. Still there are pixel grade deviations and some people aren't satisfied. Personally if I were to add fake bokeh that precision would be enough for me.Awful - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Yeah, they weren't really meant to be separate concerns- they're all factors contributing to portraits. I.e. how the exposure is chosen, how the depth is mapped to the bokeh/blue, how edge detection is done and masked for blurring, how AI/ML is used to make adjustments etc. All great computational photography stuff...that this review is silent on.Lau_Tech - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Hi Andrei, as a s10 exynos owner, was interested to see your updated comparison pics between the snapdragon and exynos. Looking at the pics from ur S10 review and now, it seems to me that the gap has closed substantially especially in daytime photos? What do you think?