iPhone 6 outpaces Galaxy S6 in high-end gaming comparison

By Killian Bell

Apple’s latest iPhones may be six months older than the Galaxy S6, but they have no problem outpacing Samsung’s flagship — and all other competitors — in a high-end gaming comparison.

GameBench found the iPhone 6 to be top in both frames-per-second and stability across all game types.

In its “Battle of Sixes” comparison, GameBench put the iPhone 6 up against the Galaxy S6, the HTC One M9, and Google’s Nexus 6. It then ran 10 high-end smartphone games on each one, including GTA: San Andreas, Monument Valley, and Marvel: Content of Champions.

The chart below shows the iPhone 6 has a 10 percent average lead across the ten games that GameBench tested.

“The iPhone 6 tended to run games more smoothly, with a higher average frame rate that was very stable and rarely dropped below 30fps,” reads its report. “The Galaxy S6 came a pretty close second, with a greater frequency of performance bottlenecks that pushed the framerate below the 30fps threshold.”

The One M9, which is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 810 processor, and the Nexus 6 showed “serious performance slow-downs in some games,” GameBench found. However, the reasons for those slow-downs aren’t easy to pinpoint.

“We’re totally focused on measuring the way real games play on real devices, in order to provide useful intelligence to game developers and hardware makers,” GameBench says. “Our data can’t always pinpoint the reasons for certain results, because there are so many uncontrolled variables.”

GameBench adds, however, that reasons might include better game optimization for certain platforms, and the fact that some titles play at a higher resolution on the Galaxy S6 than the iPhone 6 (1080p vs. 720p) because of its sharper Quad HD display.