GameBench Performance Badges: The Standard for Seamless Gaming Experiences

Clients of GameBench services, including both game makers and device makers, are already familiar with our performance rating system. They use our simple, color-coded badges on a regular basis, often monthly or quarterly, to help them visualize key data and make vital decisions such as:

  • How does my game perform on the most important devices compared to similar games in its category?
  • How does my device perform compared to the competition when running the most popular mobile games in the market?
  • Where does my team need to focus resources to prevent a lack of gaming performance hurting commercial performance? 

In fact, our badges have become so important to so many decisions, from development all the way through to marketing, that it's about time we revisited what the badges mean and how they're evolving.

Read More

Huawei P40 Pro Delivers Ultra 90fps Performance in High-Fidelity Games

GameBench Labs regularly conducts confidential performance tests for its clients. Occasionally, and with the explicit consent of those clients, we will publish those results for the benefit of the gaming community. This article is one such example where Huawei, a GameBench client, has allowed the results of commissioned tests to be shared. 

DISCLAIMER: Huawei is a GameBench client, like many device and game makers, and it sent us pre-release devices and a list of popular Tencent games to test. However, Huawei had no control over our test methodology, results or performance ratings, which are standardised across all our testing projects.

If you've been following the launch of the P40 Pro, you might have spotted that this new Huawei phone sports a 90Hz display rather than the 60Hz that is typical of iPhones and older Androids. A quicker refresh rate is potentially of interest to gamers, promising smoother and more responsive gameplay, but only if games actually animate consistently at this higher speed. And that's a big 'if'. 

In fact, ever since the first 90Hz and 120Hz phones started coming out a couple of years ago, we've found that the overwhelming majority have failed to maintain their marketed rates of animation for any length of time, particularly in high-fidelity competitive games that would benefit most from the technology. The optimisation between hardware and software just wasn't there.

Fortunately for gamers, the P40 Pro is different. It achieves our GameBench Ultra 90 badge with both Game for Peace and QQ Speed, reflecting solid 90fps animation even after prolonged gameplay. Read on to see our test data. 

Read More

HONOR View 20 game benchmarks: frame rates for PUBG, Arena of Valor and Modern Combat 5

The brand new Honor View 20 is a mid-tier smartphone that promises top-tier gaming performance, due to the fact that it shares the same chipset (Kirin 980) as flagship phones. As a consumer, it's easy to accept this type of marketing logic ("fast chip = fast phone"), especially when other manufacturers like OnePlus and Xiaomi have repeated it so often. But real-world testing shows that it's not always so simple: thermals, drivers, APIs, game engines and various software optimisations can be at least as important as the chipset when it comes to gaming, so real game benchmarks are essential. Read on to see what they reveal about the Honor View 20...

Read More

Huawei Mate 20 X gaming benchmarks: GameBench Labs reveals frame rates for top games

Huawei launched the Mate 20 X today with a simple marketing claim: this is a smartphone dedicated to the needs of gamers. But such claims need evidence and that's why Huawei (a GameBench client) sent a pre-release device over to our new testing department, GameBench Labs. We tested the phone's graphical performance across three popular and computationally demanding mobile titles that Huawei nominated: NBA 2K18 by 2K, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang by Moonton, and PUBG Mobile by Tencent Games. Read on to see how the Mate 20 X fared compared to the Apple iPhone Xs Max and Samsung Galaxy Note9.

Read More

Introducing GameBench Labs: Providing verified performance results to device makers and game studios

GameBench is rapidly growing in popularity as a mobile testing tool, which people can use for any purpose they like. It's great to see our software being used by phone enthusiasts like XDA for benchmarking, by game studios like Rovio for QA and by device makers like OnePlus for hardware optimisation. At the same time, we've also seen increased demand from our clients for us to offer GameBench as an end-to-end benchmarking service, in which we take charge of testing and publishing authoritative and credible results for their products. In response, after a year of experimenting with publishing ratings via our Reference Data Beta, we're pleased to announce the launch of GameBench Labs! Please read on for more...

Read More