[Galaxy S III General] gliatiotis:
When benchmarking the SGS iii , yes the results are not as good as they should be . However the device performs excellent in everyday use , and if playing games is not the main usage scenario , it actually has almost no problems doing anything . After all , gaming is something done better on Nvidia based devices simply because they are supported better by most developers .

Although i really don't get why playing games on a phone is an improtant factor when choosing a device , but that is my personal opinion .

There is almost no way to make the SGS iii , regardless of the variant , perform slowly on something unless you are trying to do exactly that .

Menu scrolling , apllication execution , and graphics drawing is done without problems so at least in my opinion , Samsung's choise in hardware was almost perfect in their effort to create an all around complete device . They even managed to create three different versions that work without many problems of any kind.

As for the 2GB issue , yes in some cases , the amount of RAM can be an issue in the 1GB versions . When you use the phone without any kind of optimization , and actively using most features , including wireless media transfer to other devices there may be a problem .

Although I hardly think that streaming a movie to a TV set is something that you must be able to do on a mobile phone while having Chrome with 4 tabs opened on the background , and in this case , battery is probably a bigger issue .

LTE phones have 2GB's of RAM mostly because the extra amount is needed for the data transfer to work without problems . Since most phones have bottlenecks in data manipulation after they are received from the network , with 1GB of RAM being almost full from anything else there is a need for extra temporary storage . On top of that , since data transfer is done in packet bursts , some packets are received with faults and have to be re-sent from the network . Given LTE's ability to combine the correct contents from two same packets that contain different errors , this also requires some extra temporary storage that increases as the packets get bigger and the data transfer speed faster .

iPhone 5 for example has another 1GB of RAM available on a stand-alone chip , that is inaccessible from the OS and is used only on LTE transfers .

I have a phone with a 1080p screen and 2 GB of RAM (not an HTC variant....) and honestly you have to leave an insane amount of applications running on the background to drop below 1GB of free RAM . Default applications that start automatically after booting a device can take up great amounts of memory but killing them if you don't need them is something that can be done easily even in non rooted phones .

SGS iii was designed and put on the market long before anything better came out as an over-all device . Given as a fact that the development stage starts long before a device reaches the market , Samsung used the best available hardware at that time , or at least the hardware available that could provide a complete phone at the time Samsung wanted to launch the device .

Quad-core Krait based SoC's are only now reaching the market , and in only a few phones (not counting 5" phablets ) after almost six months since the SGS iii was announced . I have used most of them , and to be honest , although the performance is much better when measured and benchmarked , the power consumption is also a lot greater , and you and up with a device that runs faster for a very short period of time .

Playing games with high FPS counts and high quality graphics on a 1080p screen at this point requires carrying around a charger with you , since batteries can not even keep the phone running for more that a few hours in that usage scenario and actually using the phone for anything else except gaming requires the help of a charger sooner than in any quad-core ARM A-9 based device .