How fast is the Huawei P30?

• The P30 is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 980 CPU and features 6GB of RAM.
• The Huawei P30 offers great performance and will blitz through high-fidelity games.
• The Huawei P30’s cooling system is surprisingly effective.

Huawei’s HiSilicon chips have consistently impressed when it comes to performance – and this remains the case on the P30.

6GB of RAM isn’t industry-leading, and there are phones with more that cost the same. But with regular use, it’s hard to fault the P30’s performance. Apps open in milliseconds, menus scroll smoothly and I’m yet to find a process the handset can’t handle. Shooting and editing RAW photos was a smooth, jitter-free experience, and it ran every 3D game I threw at it at 60fps without pause.

Running the Huawei P30 through Trusted Reviews’ standard suite of synthetic benchmarks, the phone’s scores were slightly lower than expected, however.

Geekbench 4

Geekbench 4 is a CPU-focused benchmark that checks how a phone handles single and multi-core tasks. In the past, most Android apps and processes used a single CPU core, which is the reason that a few years ago we’d have taken the first score as the most important. But nowadays, a greater number of processes utilise multiple threads, and Android’s increased focus on multi-tasking means that multi-core is now a much more important metric of a phone’s performance.

The P30’s scores put it on a par with the Galaxy S10 when it comes to multi-core performance but well behind on single-core. Out of the box, this won’t be an issue, but it could be a problem further down the line, as more demanding games and applications hit the market.

AnTuTu

AnTuTu is a generalist benchmark that attempts to gauge a phone’s overall performance. The benchmarks runs the phone through tests mimicking everything from web browsing and document editing to 3D gaming.

The P30’s AnTuTu score is solid, showing a significant improvement over the P20 and P20 Pro’s performance. Once again, it does place it slightly behind the Galaxy S10 family, however.

3DMark: Sling Shot Extreme

3DMark is a GPU-focused benchmark that tests a phone’s gaming and graphical performance. Sling Shot and Sling Shot Extreme are two of its more demanding tests and offer good insight into how a phone is likely to handle the demands of 3D gaming. It includes scores for the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. These are two different core tools developers use when making games.

Once more, the P30’s scores put it behind 2019’s top-end flagships – but they’re a decent improvement on last year’s models.

Trusted Score