How good is the Huawei P30 Pro’s performance?

• The P30 Pro is powered by a Kirin 980 chipset, first used in the Mate 20 Pro last year.
• There’s 8GB of RAM on all versions and storage options of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB.
• It’s a fast phone in use, even if its benchmarks scores can’t quite match some rival handsets.

Huawei’s flagship chipset is the Kirin 980, which is built using the same super-efficient 7nm architecture as the Snapdragon 855 you’ll find in the US versions of the Samsung Galaxy S10 and the Xiaomi Mi 9.

• Want a powerful smartphone? Here are the best phones this year

The P30 Pro is a fast phone, one that could handle everything thrown at it during the review process. Considering the silicon on offer, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. There’s a hefty 8GB of RAM inside, too, helping to keep multitasking smooth. Part of the Kirin 980 is the Mali-G76 MP10 GPU, which helps games run very well even on high settings. Happily, the P30 pro barely became even slightly warm during intensive periods of gaming.

Huawei P30 Pro processor: Geekbench 4

Geekbench is a CPU-focused benchmark, and is arguably the most well-known and commonly used benchmarking tool. We run all the phones we review through Geekbench since it offers a general score for overall performance.

The results comprise of scores for single-core and multi-core performance. Single-core scores used to be the most important metric of a phone’s performance, since most Android apps are optimised to use only a single thread. However, advances in Android mean more and more processes are multi-thread.

The Huawei P30 Pro scores as I’d expect: ahead of phones running older chips such as the Snapdragon 845, but behind newer chips such as the A12 Bionic from Apple.

Huawei P30 Pro overall system: AnTuTu

AnTuTu is a generalist benchmark that synthetically tests everything from theoretical gaming performance to picture editing and basic web browsing. As is the case with Geekbench, the P30 Pro sits in the middle of the pile, slightly behind phones running the Snapdragon 845 and A12 Bionic.

Huawei P30 Pro graphics: 3DMark

3DMark’s Sling Shot benchmark focuses on checking a phone’s GPU performance. The P30 Pro falls below some of its rivals here. Thankfully, this is an anomaly; real-world use shows this is a strong phone for gaming.