Huawei’s new software optimisation for mobile gaming, which goes by the name of GPU Turbo, has so far received a skeptical reception in Europe. This is understandable, because Huawei handset owners won't get the GPU Turbo update until later this month (starting with P20, Mate 10 and Honor 10 models), and in the meantime there's been little evidence to support the manufacturer’s bold claims about improved performance and power consumption.
Battle Royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) rely on the principle that all players start on a broadly equal footing. So when a player is put at a disadvantage by their mobile device, for example through increased lag or other technical issues, then it's bound to hurt the game -- as many iPhone X owners are discovering to their cost.
Common sense tells us that this should be a match made in heaven: One of the world's most popular and profitable mobile games, Arena of Valor, running on one of the world's most popular and powerful smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S9. But rather than rely on common sense, we prefer objective data. How well does this pairing of app and device perform in reality? How power efficient is it? And is the gaming experience an upgrade over the Galaxy S8 or iPhone X? We used the GameBench Android app (available for free from the Play Store) to find out...
Following the badly-handled iPhone throttling controversy and a series of widely-reported bugs in iOS 11, senior people at Apple are finally being forced to acknowledge that something is going wrong with the fundamental quality of their products. But are we just talking about clumsy management and poor pre-release testing? Or is it possible that Apple's bugs are actually helping the company to mask a more damaging truth about the underlying performance and battery life of its phones, especially relative to Android-based rivals?
It's easy to dismiss 120fps mobile gaming as a curiosity that is only available to owners of a handful of premium devices -- notably the iPad Pro (10.5 and 12.9) and the Razer Phone. But the truth is that this sudden increase in the smoothness and responsiveness of animation (twice the standard maximum of 60 frames per second) is already supported by some of the biggest studios and mobile games.