The LG G3 is one of our favorite smartphones
from 2014. Back then, it was an awesome product
in many ways, but it was a little broken in some
ways as well. Its problems with getting hot and
straining to perform under heavy processor load,
along with its unimpressive battery life, had
many users pointing their fingers at the
industry's first 5.5-inch 1440x2560 LCD display
as the main culprit. After all, it was an easy
target - it sucked out pixel-pushing horsepower,
while bringing a diminutive improvement in image
clarity over tried and proven 1080p displays.
Later that year, the LG G3's modding and
developer community had flourished, and several
new Quad-HD devices - the Samsung Galaxy Note
4 , Galaxy Note Edge , Moto Droid Turbo , and Meizu
MX4 Pro - were introduced. Obviously, Q-HD was
here to stay, whether we needed it or not!
Meanwhile, modders had rooted the LG G3, and
around that time, the idea of lowering Quad-HD
devices' screen resolution to a more serene 1080p
began making rounds.
What's this idea about? As you probably know, a
screen is comprised of “pixels”. Each pixel is one
point of light, and that one point of light is
capable of representing any color. The idea is to
make the G3's processor and graphics unit deal
with less pixels. The G3's screen resolution is a
fixed 1440x2560 pixels, which means that
normally, the display expects the smartphone to
feed a whopping 3,686,400 pixels to it!
If we force the LG G3 to work in 1080x1920
resolution, the display's fixed resolution will stay
the same, but much less pixels - 2,073,600, to be
precise - will be fed to it. This will result in a
considerable load being taken off the hardware.
It's a bulletproof technique, one that every PC
gamer has applied to coax higher frame rates out
of their rig, for example. But won't that degrade
the image quality? After all, the LG G3's screen
is made exclusively for Quad-HD resolution!
When we force the smartphone into 1080p
resolution, we're making it put 2 million pixels in
a room for 3.7 million pixels. This means the
graphics unit has to stretch those 2m pixels into
occupying space for 3.6m pixels, or the picture
will look wonky. This technique is called
interpolation, and is known to cause the image
quality to degrade. Here's why - when the LG G3
is set to 1440x2560, each of the 3.7 million pixels
it outputs takes exactly one pixel from its
screen. That's a perfect 1-to-1 match. But when
we change the resolution to 1080p, each pixel will
be stretched into 2 pixels or more, and we'll no
longer have that perfect matching. However, we
are still left with many, many pixels that are
crammed into so little physical space (5.5 inches
by diagonal) that the result of interpolation is
barely noticeable.
What we did and how we did it
We took a Korean LG G3 F400S model with 3GB of
RAM, and wiped it into a completely clean state.
Not only there was no data on it, but the
smartphone wouldn't even boot, because it had no
operating system on it. We then flashed original
LG G3 firmware from June 2014, and proceeded to
install all available OTA updates, one by one. We
didn't get Lollipop, but we got our G3 as close to
"stock" as humanly possible. And then, it was
show time!
First, we wanted to measure the performance
again. We ran three passes of AnTuTu, followed
by three passes of GFXBench's Manhattan
Onscreen and T-Rex Onscreen tests. We recorded
the results and calculated the average score -
that's our standard procedure.
Next, we charged up our "newborn" LG G3 F400S
to 100% and ran our proprietary battery test.
The end result was 6 hours and 19 minutes,
negligibly better than the 6 hours and 14 minutes
of our initial LG G3 battery test from 2014.
After we went through that, it was time to show
the LG G3 what we're made of! We rooted it and
installed Nomone Resolution Changer. It's a
simple app that does the job nice and quick. A
few seconds later, our LG G3's display resolution
was brought down to 1080x1920. Then, we
repeated the benchmarks and battery test.
Ready for the big reveal? Here are the results:
LG G3 Benchmark Results
Test Average Score Performance Increase
1440x2560
AnTuTu 32,915 (Total) | 9494 (3D) -
Manhattan Onscreen 7.1 FPS -
T-Rex Onscreen 19 FPS -
PhoneArena Battery Test 6hr, 19min and 0sec -
1080x1920
AnTuTu 41,880 (Total) | 14,136 (3D) 27.24% (Total) | 48.89% (3D)
Manhattan Onscreen 13 FPS 83%
T-Rex Onscreen 30 FPS 57.89%
PhoneArena Battery Test 6hr, 26min and 47sec 7min 47sec (1.97%)
As you can see, the results are stellar! Our 1080p
LG G3 enjoys a near 30% increase in overall
performance. Meanwhile, 3D performance nearly
doubles! The effects are noticeable not only in
synthetic benchmarks, but in actual 3D games
too. You can expect a moderate to substantial
FPS increase in games where the LG G3 normally
struggles, which will lead to smoother graphics.
In addition, the smartphone isn't so quick to
throttle down its CPU and GPU frequencies, and it
stays a lot cooler.
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