The S7 Edge was marginally faster than the Galaxy S6 at loading apps and performing basic tasks like applying Instagram filters in a side-by-side comparison. In general, though, I don’t expect users to notice a significant day-to-day performance difference between the S7 Edge and the Galaxy S6. Moving from a two-year-old device like the Galaxy S5 will show larger performance differences, as the Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820 are significantly faster than the Snapdragon 801. Times where I thought the S7 Edge may stutter, it didn’t. Opening the Edge screen, which applies a blur filter to the background, over the top of a performance-intensive app like a camera with filters applied did not drop frames at any times, instead delivering a consistently smooth experience. I even managed to edit photos while large webpages were loading in split-screen view, which something the S6 struggles to maintain smooth performance in.
In a collection of general system and CPU limited benchmarks, we see the Galaxy S7 Edge equipped with an Exynos 8890 outperform the Galaxy S6 with its Exynos 7420 by around 21%. However performance from the S7 Edge was lower than I expected in PCMark, which might reflect how close the S7 Edge is to other high-end devices already on the market. Compared to the Sony Xperia Z5, which was one of the fastest Snapdragon 810 devices I reviewed, the Galaxy S7 Edge records performance around 24% faster in CPU-limited workloads. The largest gains were seen in web benchmarks, along with Basemark’s system score, although again there wasn’t a huge gap between the S7 Edge and Snapdragon 810 devices in PCMark.
