The December update will unlock better gaming performance on Google Pixel 8. How? Thanks to the significant contribution of new drivers dedicated to the “Mali” GPU part, integrated into the Tensor G3 processor.
Criticized for their lack of power, the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have not quite said their last word. If their Tensor G3 remains slower than most competing processors (especially since the Dimensity 9300 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will soon arrive on the market), the latter will very soon gain muscle on the graphics level, thanks to a serious software boost.
Expected in the coming days, the first update “ Feature Drop » will allow Google to deploy new graphics drivers on its SoC. More precisely, these drivers are dedicated to kernelMali-G715 iGPU ARM « Immortalis», integrated into the Tensor G3.
New graphics drivers more than welcome
The result ? A massive improvement in in-game performance. On the Pixel 8 Pro, early observers report 20 to 25 frames per second more on resource-intensive mobile titles, such as Genshin Impact . On the Pixel 8 “ classic » this time, maintain the 60 FPS mark on Fortnite without a drop in speed, is now possible.
In this case, this update allows the Tensor G3 iGPU to operate on a much more recent software base (we move frombuildr38p1 launched in August 2022, atbuildr44p1 introduced on October 11, 2023). Enough to explain the fairly spectacular jump in performance measured on the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.
Note that Google is also rolling out these new ARM drivers to the Android 14 1.1 QPR2 beta, so if you’re currently testing this beta, you should see a similar performance improvement.
Another clarification, and not the least, we also learn that thesedriversare deployed on all Pixel smartphones equipped with a Tensor processor. To a lesser extent, older generations of devices should therefore also benefit from an improvement in graphics performance… which is obviously always a good thing.