Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones launched in October, and ship with the in-house Tensor G3 chipset. These smartphones are getting negative reviews in terms of gaming.
Google Pixel 8 series gaming performance
Now, according to the latest information, the new update is said to boost the CPU performance significantly. Google is updating the ARM Mali’s kernel driver to a more recent build. The kernel driver is updated to r44p1 (which was released on October 11th 2023) from r38p1, released on August 18, 2022. As per the early feedback, it appears the update brings a huge jump in gaming performance.
One of the Pixel 8 users reports that the phone’s frame rate in Genshin Impact’s Fontaine city jumped from ~20-25fps to 45+fps, all without any excessive heating. YouTuber TechDroider notes a similar jump in the gaming performance as Pixel 8 is now able to run Fortnite at a stable 60fps on the highest graphics settings.
Google is bundling the new ARM Driver with Android 14 QPR2 Beta 1.1 as well. While the GPU performance may not be as good as the Adreno GPU inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (which powers phones like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and OnePlus 11), this is still a decent performance boost.
Google is rolling out the new Mali GPU driver to all Tensor-based Pixels. While this might not result in the same level of performance boost as the Pixel 8, there should be reasonable improvements.
