Galaxy Note 9 benchmarked: Falls behind OnePlus 6, iPhone X

Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 9 at an event in New York last night and Tom’s Guide didn’t waste any time before pitting the flagship device against its rivals for benchmark testing.

The Galaxy Note 9 with Snapdragon 845 and 6GB of RAM has now been benchmarked using Geekbench 4 and 3DMark Slingshot Extreme 3.1 and the results are surprising, or should we say disappointing. After a handful of testing, the Note 9 fell short of Apple’s iPhone X and to make matters worse, even the cheaper OnePlus 6 outdid the current Samsung flagship.

The Geekbench 4 benchmark takes into account the performance of processors under all cores and the Note 9 delivered a score of 8,876 points which would’ve been termed decent if its results weren’t compared to its market rivals. The Note 9 not only scored far below last year’s Apple flagship iPhone X (10,357 points) but also fell short of OnePlus 6’s benchmarked score of 9,088 points. While the OnePlus 6 variant in question was the 8GB version, it’s to be noted that the most expensive OnePlus 6 is still way cheaper than the entry Note 9 device. However, there’s a significant change in performance when the Note device is compared to last year’s Galaxy Note 8 which only scored 6,564 points on Geekbench.

Coming to 3DMark’s Slingshot Extreme 3.1 test which determines the graphics strength of smartphones, the Note 9 still came behind the iPhone X and OnePlus 6, with the latter topping the list with a score of 5,124 points. The Note 9 with its Adreno 630 graphics came out with a respectable 4,639 score, while still falling short of iPhone X’s 4,994 points. It must be noted that the graphics Benchmarking of the Note 9 shared a ton of similarities with the Galaxy S9 Plus that was launched at the start of the year.

While stress and benchmark tests aren’t the only basis for comparing two phones, it’s quite clear now that Samsung didn’t actually develop the Note 9 as a breakthrough device but just as a mere followup to last year’s Galaxy Note 8.