As promised, chip maker MediaTek has revealed its first processors designed specifically for gaming smartphones. The new MediaTek Helio G90 series chips combine speedy CPU and GPU hardware with software enhancements that MediaTek says “tunes your entire smartphone for the greatest gaming experience possible.”

The chips also support plenty of RAM, high-resolution cameras, and plenty of other features you’d expect from high-performance smartphones even if you don’t care about gaming.

Here’s a run-down of the specs announced so far (there are a few things that are still vague, like the breakdown of how many of each type of CPU cores we can expect):

  • Octa-core CPU w/ARM Cortex-A76 + Cortex+A55 cores and top speeds of 2.05 GHz
  • ARM Mali-G76 3EEMC4 graphics up to 800 MHz
  • Up to 10GB LPDDR4x-2133MHz RAM
  • Up to 64MP single camera or 21MP + 16MP dual cameras (and 240fps video capture)
  • 4G LTE Cat-12 support

MediaTek says it can use AI for facial recognition, and the company’s “HyperEngine” game technology to optimize a phone for gaming by doing things like reducing touch latency, automatically enabling WiFi and LTE to run concurrently if your network signal is degrading, and allows you to connect to 2.4 Ghz and 5 GHz WiFi networks at the same time for more reliable connectivity.

While MediaTek’s press release for the Helio G90 series mentions the “Helio G90 & G90T,” it’s not clear what, if any differences there are between the two model numbers at this point, since only one set of specs seems to have been released for both at this point. Perhaps we’ll learn more if and when phones powered by the new chip(s) are announced in the coming months.

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7 replies on “MediaTek unveils Helio G90 series chips for gaming phones”

  1. Maybe I missed it, but I did not see what size process they are using.

  2. As far as I know the poor documentation and support of the Mali GPU makes it not well suited for gaming. For example the Samsung S8 phones with Exynos SoC and Mali GPU are inferior in games to the Snapdragon one, even thou in raw performance the Exynos should be superior.

    1. It’s more so the driver support, and that all the best/demanding graphical games have been built using the Qualcomm SDK.

      Kind of like using AMD graphics card instead of Nvidia, when using a Linux Distro. Both work “fine” but one works much more optimally, despite the underlying hardware potential.

        1. Not quite.
          Say I’m a developer and I build a game. On Android there are many different ways for this, but there are two popular Game Engines: Unity and Unreal. Both are optimised with the Qualcomm SDK, but they also work “normally” for OpenGL.

          Now it doesn’t matter how much documentation is available from ARM and Samsung (Exynos), the game was optimised for Snapdragon SoC’s. You can see this when something like a QSD 636 is performing much better than a Kirin 710, Helio P70, or Exynos 9610, when it shouldn’t.

          A part of this reason is also the driver stack. Qualcomm spends millions yearly for their chipset platforms, and these go hand-in-hand with their SDK. Other chipset vendors like Samsung, Huawei, MediaTek, etc etc don’t nearly as much spend time, effort, and money on this front. If you try to develop an AOSP ROM for these devices, you can either “hack” the stock firmware drivers/kernel (arduous/buggy), or try to use source-code instead. Samsung’s source-code is probably “the best” in this list, but even then there are issues. It’s only here when you run into issues with documentation. Which becomes a double-whammy when you realise the Samsung Galaxy-S devices (whilst excellent) can only have the hardware/bootloader unlocked when using their ARM/Exynos variant, despite the weaker documentation/source/drivers, and so devices like the Google Pixel 4 or OnePlus 7 pro can run rings around it.

          1. Thanks for the verbose reply……..so you’re saying “…..poor documentation and support of the mali gpu makes it not well suited for gaming……” Literally, if the devs themselves supported the chipset themselves better (I fully understand the realities of this) , and made it more appealing for more content creators to use it, there would be a better gaming experience.

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