Samsung, the world’s biggest phone manufacturer has just updated its 2021 flagship lineup with the brand-new Galaxy S21 series, which includes the Galaxy S21, the Galaxy S21 +, and the Galaxy S21 Ultra. And as promised before, we got a unit of the Galaxy S21 and have been testing the device for the past few days. Since you can find plenty of unboxing and hands-on videos of the S21 on youtube, we instead focused on how the Mi 11 fares in comparison to the new Samsung model. So today we are going to bring you a deep gaming comparison between the S21 and the Xiaomi Mi 11 and briefly talk about their UIs.

As an early flagship model in 2021, the S21 is much more recognizable in appearance. Since you may have already learned much about these two models’ design, we are not going to go through it again and waste your time. So let’s just focus on their gaming experience.

Indeed, we have praised the light and thin design of the Mi 11, but the S21 has an even lighter design, which no doubt is able to provide a better holding experience during long hours of gaming.

Galaxy S21 vs Xiaomi Mi 11: Display

Samsung is one of the first few brands that started the trend of curved display on their flagship models. Since the S6 Edge, the edge-curved display has become one of the series’ most distinctive features. But this time around the S21 comes with a traditional flat display, while other brands including Xiaomi just started their journey with curved displays.

However, we are really happy to see the flat display come back because personally I feel, having a flat-screen for gaming and videos is absolutely a better option. What’s very interesting here is that the Mi 11 utilizes Samsung’s latest 2K 120Hz panel, while Samsung has downgraded the s21’s resolution to 1080p. Here, Samsung is telling you that if you want a better display with a higher resolution, just pay more money and get the S21 Ultra. Both the Mi 11 and the S21 have an excellent color presentation, but if we just focus on gaming, you can’t really pick one as the one with a better display, no matter for the colors or for resolution.

Although the light and thin design of the Mi 11 offers comfortable holding when gaming for a long time, the S21 has an even lighter design. Therefore, even though the Mi 11 has a bigger display, we still strongly feel that the whole visual experience on the S21 is better in our gaming test.

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Actually, we don’t think these two phones are the ideal models for gaming. In our comparison between the Mi 11 and the iQOO 7, you can see how additional buttons improve gaming operation. If we had to pick one who’s better at gaming, we would give our credit to the Mi 11 which has a slightly bigger display for a less crowded button-layout. And the Mi 11’s sampling rate is a bit higher than the S21, although it’s not easy to perceive this difference.

Samsung Galaxy S21 vs Xiaomi Mi 11: Benchmark & Gaming Performance

Now let’s focus on their performance. The S21 series released in Europe features Samsung’s own flagship chipset, the Exynos 2100, while the model in our hands is powered by the Snapdragon 888. From what we got on these benchmarks, the result shows a tiny gap between these two models within 8 percent, except for the Antutu benchmark results, which showed a 12% lead for Mi 11. So theoretically the S21 should have a close performance to what we have on the Mi 11. However, the real difference is higher than what we expected.

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But it doesn’t mean that the S21 is worthless over gaming. For example, in shooting games like PUBG Mobile which is well-optimized, the S21 has almost the same performance as the Mi 11. The consistent high framerate shows that the PUBG Mobile now is not a problem at all for these high-end models.

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And then we turned to the NBA 2K20, the game that is able to support higher-framerate gaming. So in this game, both of them can reach up to a maximum 120fps, but both of them throttled down performance several times in our 20mins gaming test.

After the latest update, the Mi 11 finally fixed the issue of the lazy big core and the performance mode of the CPU lasted for much longer than before. Its first performance down throttling happened at the 9-minute mark. While the Samsung S21 was more disappointing with it throttling down the CPU in just 2 minutes. And it eventually limited the frame rate down to 60fps most of the time. So when you look back to their frame rate results, not so surprisingly, the average frame rate for the S21 running the NBA 2k is only 70.74fps, while the average figure for the Mi 11 is 105.15fps.

But these figures are not even close to the results that we tested on the 2020’s flagship models running the Snapdragon 865. And the S21’s result once again proves the optimization issue of the Snapdragon 888. But, of course, this aggressive down throttling reduced the surface temperature and the power output of the S21.

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And then let’s move on to the results of the Genshin Impact. Well, this game is an absolute nightmare for the snapdragon 888. All we can say is that the result for the S21 is worse. Even though the average framerate of 28.72fps was gathered from a mid-range phone, it would be still terrible, not to say that it’s tested from a giant brand’s flagship model. Then we ran the game on Mi 11 to see whether its performance improved after the latest update. Well as you can see, a different issue just occurred — higher frame rate fluctuation. Although it seemed that the big core was working well, it didn’t reflect in better gaming fluency. Still the result of 47.3fps is still much better than what we got on the S21.

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The last game we tested was Nimian Legends. The situation for the S21 didn’t change. The gap is still huge between these two models. The Mi 11 ran at 52.09fps on average, while the S21 only ran at 32.57fps.

So from all the tests we did, we have to admit that the S21 didn’t take full advantage of the latest flagship chipset. And it’s probably the most conservative model among all the Snapdragon 888 flagships in the market right now. And it seems that the Mi 11 also got the better performance over its GPU dispatch.

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But at the same time, the S21 did perform better in terms of the cooling effect and power consumption. In the test of Nimian Legends, the S21 didn’t over-heat and was able to control the perceivable temperature under 47℃, and it only consumed 15% of power, while the Mi 11 easily heated up to 53℃ and it consumed 20% of power as we mentioned in the last video.

Xiaomi Mi 11 vs Galaxy S21: UIs

In addition to their performance, we think it’s necessary to briefly talk about their UIs too. The S21 is running the One UI, which is one of the most customizable UIs in the Android ecosystem. When you get the phone, your first impression might be that the UI is boring without any features. Indeed there is not much you can do with its default settings. However, Samsung has officially offered customizable UI features via an App called Good Look, and you need to download the app from the Samsung Appstore. In the App, you will see the basic UI get a number of customizable UI features, such as Navigation bar, operating gesture, dynamic wallpaper elements, and so on. And even some basic settings were hidden inside the app collection of the Good Look family, such as the adjustment of edge touch for avoiding mis-touches.

On the contrary, on the Mi 11, the highly integrated MIUI feels a bit bloated with so many features. Some are creative and useful, and some will never be used in their lifetime. And it has pretty comfortable animations too, if it’s running fluently. But unfortunately, the Mi 11 still lagged sometimes. And make sure that you can live with its ads if you are going to buy the Chinese version.

So that’s it. We have covered all the important information that we want to share with you, mainly about the S21’s disappointing gaming performance and its UI details when directly compared to the popular Mi 11. As for the camera performance of the S21 series, we will bring the S21 Ultra to our labs soon and compare it with other top camera phones of 2021.

The reason why we didn’t compare the S21’s cameras with the Mi 11’s is very simple: after we checked their camera samples, the Mi 11 lost the competition in almost all rounds. And the S21 is even not the best model of the series. 

But you can check out our comparison of the Galaxy S21 with the Vivo X60 Pro+ down below.

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