iQOO 9 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.
Despite its powerful hardware, the phone offers mixed performance.
iQOO 9 Pro comes with a number of gaming features.
After enjoying great success with its 7 series phones, iQOO appears to be going big with its flagships for 2022. The new iQOO 9 series phones are not only faster in comparison to the phones launched by the company last year, but also look far more premium than them. And to spice up the mix, the two phones also sport flagship-grade cameras that can match the performance of the most expensive camera phones in the market.
But that's a conversation for another day. Right now, we have with us the iQOO 9 Pro, and because it's still a no-nonsense gaming phone at heart, we'll be testing its performance in games and real-world scenarios to give you an idea if it's worth your money.
iQOO 9 Pro: Specifications
The iQOO 9 Pro is amongst the most powerful, if not the most powerful phone in the business right now. And this is because it packs the absolute best hardware money can buy in pretty much all the departments. So for the display, we see the company use a 6.78-inch 120Hz LTPO AMOLED panel with a normal maximum brightness of 500 nits, 1000nits in the High Brightness Mode and peak, localised brightness of 1500nits while watching HDR 10+ or HDR high dynamic range video.
This is a 10bit panel that can display 1.07 billion colours and is also backed by an Intelligent Display Chip that brings with itself a number of neat tricks to improve not just gaming, but also the experience of watching movies or even browsing the internet on the phone.
Then underneath the hood, we have the biggest hardware upgrade to the device in the form of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. Built using a 4nm fabrication process, this chipset comes with a three-cluster Kryo 780 CPU and an Adreno 730 graphics processing unit. This has been paired to up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The phone is also backed by a big 4700mAh battery pack which is can be charged really fast using the phone's 120W fast charger. Plus, there's support for 50W wireless fast charging. And lest we forget, for clicking photos, we have a front camera that is 16-megapixels in size and at the back, we get a 50-megapixel (Gimbal OIS) + 50-megapixel (150° ultrawide) + 16-megapixel (2.5x optical zoom) set-up.
iQOO 9 Pro: Performance
But the question is, does all this state-of-the-art hardware on the iQOO 9 Pro come together to provide sustained powerful performance? To our surprise, the answer was not always yes. While the powerful hardware managed to pull the device through pretty much all basic tasks, it surprisingly did not perform consistently well in benchmarks and some games.
While it's true the iQOO 9 Pro offers powerful performance, along with an overall enjoyable gaming experience thanks to its rich feature set, it does not manage to do it consistently across the board for all games or for that matter benchmarks.
To gauge the phone's gaming performance, we tested the iQOO 9 Pro using demanding titles such as Call of Duty 5, Asphalt 9 Legends and also Genshin Impact. Of the three, the iQOO 9 Pro handled the first two titles with relative ease at the highest possible graphics settings. However, when we switched to Genshin Impact the performance was not at the same levels that we experienced with the other two titles. Unlike the first two titles, the phone did not manage consistent frame rates, with the FPS dropping to the mid-30s. Even in Asphalt 9 Legends, the frame rate dropped at times to mid-40s in-game. But this proved to be the outlier, instead of the norm for the racing game.
The benchmark results of the iQOO 9 Pro were also a mixed bag, with the phone promising a lot with its high AnTuTu and 3DMark WildLife scores, but then surprisingly faltering in other popular benchmarks like PCMark Work 3, where it scored significantly lesser than the ROG Phone 5s which is powered by last year's Snapdragon 888+ SoC.
We found this to be very surprising, especially because the scores lacked consistency across all benchmarks, or for the matter, even games. Therefore, our best guess is the issue is possibly at the software end, with the iQOO 9 Pro's generally clean OS not able to maximise the performance of the powerful chip at hand. This honestly is not a deal-breaker at the moment as the company is already working on an update to improve the performance of the device.
However, what we did find concerning was the iQOO 9 Pro's performance in the CPU Throttling Test and also its tendency to heat up when tasked to run heavy-duty games and benchmarks. In the CPU benchmark, we found the phone throttling to about 69 per cent of its performance barely after 15 minutes of the test. This again could be because of the phone's software not handling the hardware right, or just a case of poor thermals bottlenecking the performance. Regardless, we were left asking for more from this beast that the iQOO 9 Pro promises to be.
iQOO 9 Pro: Gaming features
While the performance of the iQOO 9 Pro remains a mixed bag for now, what remains undeniable is the potential the phone offers. The iQOO 9 Pro comes with a dedicated chip to enhance visuals. iQOO calls it the Intelligent Display Chip, which can increase the frame rate and optimize colours to improve visual experiences during games. The chip also promises to re-construct the image details through algorithms to make the colors more vivid and jack up low-quality SDR images to fidelity levels similar to HDR.
iQOO is also selling a separate gamepad accessory that can further improve the gaming experience on the device. The iQOO Gamepad comes with a D-pad, a joystick, two action buttons, and a shoulder button on top. While it snaps to the phone physically, the connection between the iQOO 9 Pro and the gamepad is established over Bluetooth. This accessory is being sold separately at an affordable price point, which could see it becoming quite popular with a lot of buyers.
iQOO 9 Pro: Should you buy it?
Despite promising a lot, the iQOO 9 Pro is not the perfect gaming phone for the here and now. It offers powerful hardware and gaming first features that make it a very interesting offering. But surprisingly, its current performance levels don't do enough to justify the hype or the price tag attached to it.
Both in benchmarks and in some games, it fails to perform at the levels that it could and should. While we're not sure what's holding it back, one thing is for sure it's not the hardware. So, for now, our advice would be to skip buying this phone and possibly wait for news of an update that improves the performance of the iQOO 9 Pro.
But if you just can't wait to buy your next gaming phone, then iQOO 9 Pro won't be the worst choice. Yes, there is the ROG Phone 5s that's currently retailing at a much more affordable price point, but it is neither as future proof as to the iQOO device, nor can it offer the extras that the iQOO 9 Pro offers. Unlike the competition, the iQOO 9 Pro is a well-rounded gaming phone which can easily pass off as a full-blown flagship as well, and that honestly is its biggest strength, one that also masks all its other weaknesses.
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Sushant Talwar
Sushant Talwar is a full-time foodie who reviews cool gadgets and binges on TV shows when he is tired of playing video games. He is also in love with football and thinks Manchester United is a religion View Full Profile
