The highly anticipated flagship series, the Google Pixel 8 was introduced in October this year. Even though the smartphone was highly anticipated by everyone, it didn’t meet expectations and users had to deal with some disappointments. People had a love-hate relationship with the smartphone as there were many performance issues with the smartphones and the two Pixel smartphones even faced heating issues, especially during gaming minutes.
When it came to the Pixel 8 series, the smartphones came with an almost similar performance when compared to their predecessors. The smartphones pack the in-house Tensor G3 chipset. While playing games like Genshin Impact, the Pixel phones struggled to keep up and faced serious heating troubles.
Also read: Google Pixel 8 review: Too many tricks, too little refinement
Well, Google did take the issue and everyone’s feedback into consideration and came up with a solution for this. With the arrival of the Mountain View giant in the December 2023 Pixel Feature drop, it is hoped that we will find some relief from the issue. It is expected that this update will upgrade and boost the CPU’s performance substantially.
The latest update upgrades Google’s ARM Mali kernel driver to bring out a more recent one. This kernel has been upgraded to r44p1, the one released on October 11th, 2023, from the previous r38p1 that came out on August 18, 2022. From what we hear, this update has substantially improved the Pixel 8 smartphones’ gaming performance.
Also read: Google Pixel 8 ‘Major’ issues explained: Check out
Post the update, a Pixel 8 user, Mishaal Rahman said that while playing Genshin Impact’s Fontaine City the smartphone’s frame rate increased from ~20-25fps to 45+fps, and there was no excessive heating either.
Even YouTuber TechDroider said that after the update Fortnite is running at a stable 60fps on the highest graphics settings.
Well, this could be called a decent performance boost even though the GPU performance doesn’t match the Adreno GPU inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Further, to make the performance even better, Google is pairing this new ARM Driver with Android 14 QPR2 Beta 1.1 too.
