Went and bought the OnePlus 3 did you? And you don’t know what to do with 6GB of RAM on the device? Well, 6GB of RAM is perhaps overkill, but there are upsides to it. For one, your phone is quite future proof, and no app, at least in the foreseeable future will crash because of a lack of RAM. You can also keep more apps open in the background now, as long as your OS allows you to.
That said, none of that will really require 6GB of RAM still, and to be honest, do you really need to use all that RAM? Needless to say, most would find it impossible to use up 6GB of RAM on their phones, but that’s what OEMs are going with. You now have 3, 4 and 6GB of RAM on your phone, and we can think of many who would want to work them hard enough to use all of that memory. So, that's exactly what we tried to do. Our OnePlus 3 was being used for a Facebook Live sessions, so the tests were performed on a LeEco Le Max 2.
Note: You must use these apps simultaneously, and even then, your phone may not be closing them in the background. Let us know your findings!
Injustice: Gods Among Us
DC’s Injustice: Gods Among Us is a pretty resource hungry game, and it puts your smartphone to the test. While most smartphones today can handle this game, you’d do well to make this part of your test. It’s the first game we opened, and then paused mid-fight.
Asphalt 8
Everyone’s favourite racing game on Android was the second game we opened. It is resource hungry, has high graphics. It wasn’t enough to obliterate 6GB of RAM though.
Modern Combat 5
Fighting games, racing games, and now first person shooters. Modern Combat 5 is the next game we ran.
FlimoraGo
FilmoraGo is a free video editing app, that allows you to add effects, filters etc. to edit your videos. Normally, this wouldn’t be the most resource intensive task out there, but we put it to task, editing a 4K video on it. Oh by the way, while downloading FilmoraGo, we shot a 12 minute long 4K video, which was then played back and paused at the 2 minute mark.
Audio Mp3 Editor
From film to sound, this app is meant to edit audio, and we picked a couple of short tunes, telling the app to mix them.
Snapseed
This photo editing app is not known to be resource intensive. In fact, it is quite light. But, given that it has over 10 million downloads, we decided to use the app that most people would use. Snapseed was used to edit a photo that was clicked through the LeEco Le Max 2.
Le Vidi and Le Live
These are two video streaming apps, native to LeEco’s phones. We ran them for good measure.
Marvel: Contest of Champions
As a last ditch effort to exhaust the memory, we downloaded and ran this game. It uses an appreciable number of resources and does put pressure on the phone.
What happened next?
Up until Le Vidi and Le Live, the LeEco Le Max 2, was able to keep all the apps running in the background. According to the phone’s own memory counter, about 1.9GB of RAM was free at this point. This fell to 1.3GB when we started a fight on Marvel: Contest of Champions, and the phone had still not killed the apps in memory.
Given that LeEco's eUI is slightly heavier than OnePlus' OxygenOS, the results could be different on the OnePlus 3. Of course, OnePlus itself has chosen a different memory management method for its device, but with the right tweaks, we expect the same performance. Remember, though, more running apps in the background could result in significantly lesser battery life.
We haven't yet tried the same test on a phone with 4GB RAM, but we will do so, soon. On such a device, we expect the first app to be refreshed at around the time when we run the video editor. We shall keep running more tests, while also refining the process, and report back with our findings.