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Gaming and battery life - iPhone 5

C

cperchard

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 15, 2010
814
22
Gaming seems to absolutely kill my battery....played for about 45 mins this lunchtime and it went from 100% down to 71%......is that normal?? Only played Simpsons Tapped Out, and Family Fortunes....not exactly high performance like I'd imagine Infinity Blade!!

The phone can easily last the day if i just browse websites and listen to music and stuff.....it's just games that kill me.....don't think i've ever managed past 5 hours usage......any advice??
 
cperchard said:
Gaming seems to absolutely kill my battery....played for about 45 mins this lunchtime and it went from 100% down to 71%......is that normal?? Only played Simpsons Tapped Out, and Family Fortunes....not exactly high performance like I'd imagine Infinity Blade!!

The phone can easily last the day if i just browse websites and listen to music and stuff.....it's just games that kill me.....don't think i've ever managed past 5 hours usage......any advice??
Click to expand...

Yes. Use one of these external batteries if you are into extended gaming:

www.newtrent.com/store.html

When we flew to Hawaii from Philadelphia (11 hours plus), my son used this on the plane for his iPod and my wife and I shared one for our iPads. Never ran out of juice and my son watched videos and played games the entire time.
 
Thanks.....looks good....but I don't even consider myself an extended gamer, just on my lunch hour and a little bit at home at night, about 1hr 30 a day max.

Bit annoying that it drains so much, didn't notice it with my 4
 
FawXB.jpg
 
yes very constructive pic .....but as i already said, never had as big a problem with my iP4 so thought I'd bring it up!

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and again as already stated....i don't game "all day"
 
but it didn't drain my ip4 this bad is what i'm saying....is anyone listening?? lol :D
 
I have the same issue with my iPhone 5, and I think I've finally nailed down the problem. Some games (and I've especially noticed this with FIFA 13 and CSR Racing), play a near silent buzzing through the speakers. This can be heard if you put the phone up to your ear. This buzzing continues even when you exit to the home screen. I've confirmed this in both silent and loud mode.

The only way to stop the silent buzzing is to open multitasking and exit the offending applications.

I'm pretty sure the buzzing is causing the battery drain, because it causes the speaker to constantly draw power.

Can anyone else confirm this?
 
I'm getting great battery life for the most part, but yes, games kill my battery fast. Twenty minutes of a simple game like Angry Birds takes a big hit on my battery. I haven't played any games in the last two days and I'm on a day and a half standby and over 5 hours usage and just now down to 50%.
 
Could it possible be the type of games you are playing? Maybe you are playing a different game from your iPhone 5 that is more graphical or takes up more battery life than that game you play on the iPhone 4.
 
cperchard said:
but it didn't drain my ip4 this bad is what i'm saying....is anyone listening?? lol :D
Click to expand...

It's common sense: the iPhone 4 has an A4 chip. The 4S and 5 have the A5 chip..

My mother's iPhone 4 has great battery life when playing games, but it is (noticeably) a slower phone. When you play games on my 4S or my girlfriend's 5, the battery drains a lot quicker but the phone runs a lot faster.. This is why you were getting good battery life on your iPhone 4 and you are getting the complete opposite with your iPhone 5.

It sort of is a matter of quality over quantity. Take the iPhone 5's quality over the iPhone 4's battery life (quantity).
 
CSR crushes battery pretty hard. If I play 45-60 minutes of that game in a day I'll get 5-6 hours of usage instead of 8+ if I'm not playing it.

It's especially bad during the week since my cell signal is weak at work and always switches between LTE and 3G, always searching for a stronger signal.
 
RRutter said:
It's common sense: the iPhone 4 has an A4 chip. The 4S and 5 have the A5 chip..

My mother's iPhone 4 has great battery life when playing games, but it is (noticeably) a slower phone. When you play games on my 4S or my girlfriend's 5, the battery drains a lot quicker but the phone runs a lot faster.. This is why you were getting good battery life on your iPhone 4 and you are getting the complete opposite with your iPhone 5.

It sort of is a matter of quality over quantity. Take the iPhone 5's quality over the iPhone 4's battery life (quantity).
Click to expand...

I get what you mean, but every presentation apple do always states that they get the same battery life.....and this presentation they said it was even better than 4S......hence my disappointment in the truth.

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They state that even tho all the specs have gone up "You'd expect batter life to suffer - but it doesn't.....it's actually better"

That's what they said!
 
cperchard said:
I get what you mean, but every presentation apple do always states that they get the same battery life.....and this presentation they said it was even better than 4S......hence my disappointment in the truth.

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They state that even tho all the specs have gone up "You'd expect batter life to suffer - but it doesn't.....it's actually better"

That's what they said!
Click to expand...

Umm pretty sure they meant talk and surf time, NOT games. Games are not mentioned in the official specs for good reason, one being different games drain the battery differently.
 
RRutter said:
It's common sense: the iPhone 4 has an A4 chip. The 4S and 5 have the A5 chip..

My mother's iPhone 4 has great battery life when playing games, but it is (noticeably) a slower phone. When you play games on my 4S or my girlfriend's 5, the battery drains a lot quicker but the phone runs a lot faster.. This is why you were getting good battery life on your iPhone 4 and you are getting the complete opposite with your iPhone 5.

It sort of is a matter of quality over quantity. Take the iPhone 5's quality over the iPhone 4's battery life (quantity).
Click to expand...

The speed of a given architecture has really nothing much to do with power usage.

The Apple A4 was based on a single Cortex-A8 manufactured on a 45 nm process. The Apple A5 was based on a dual-core Cortex-A9 manufactured on the same 45 nm process but the architecture included power optimizations.

Now, the Apple A6 is based on a dual-core ARMv7 design manufactured on a 32 nm process and you can be pretty sure that it is a lot more power optimized than either of the two chips it has replaced.

The entire power envelope of the A6 chip should be lower than the A5 and A4 but the iPhone 5 has a larger screen to power and additional antennas for LTE.

If the games are ad-supported they will connect to the nearest cell tower and use power.

You can try and put the iPhone in flight mode and play a game to see if the power drain is just as much. If you are in a low coverage area the phone will boost power to the antennas to retain a signal or constantly search for a signal.

That's the only meaningful way to get a comparison.
 
cperchard said:
Gaming seems to absolutely kill my battery....played for about 45 mins this lunchtime and it went from 100% down to 71%......is that normal?? Only played Simpsons Tapped Out, and Family Fortunes....not exactly high performance like I'd imagine Infinity Blade!!

The phone can easily last the day if i just browse websites and listen to music and stuff.....it's just games that kill me.....don't think i've ever managed past 5 hours usage......any advice??
Click to expand...

Normal. Was that way on my 4. It's that way on 4S's. And that way on my 5.

5 hrs is believable and acceptable.

8 hrs on 3G web browsing? OK, that's only marginal CPU usage. Fully load CPU and GPU. 8 drops to 5hrs, sounds not bad.

Even simple 2D games are pulling from the GPU for graphical acceleration of the sprites. The batt. drain difference between Angry Birds and Infinity Blade is going to be marginal.

8 hrs web browsing. 5 hrs Angry Birds, 4.5hrs Infinity Blade. Something like that is about what I would expect, give or take a little.
 
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