The new flagship chip from MediaTek looks not bad at all in the Vivo X90 Pro – but fails to find the lead over the more popular competitor from Qualcomm in almost any respect
Last year saw an almost unprecedented situation in the world of Android smartphones, with MediaTek able to provide a real challenge to Qualcomm thanks to its Dimensity 9000 and Dimensity 9000 Plus chips, while managing to reach the top of the performance charts in at least some reviews for some models and making it difficult for The American chip developer to declare absolute supremacy for those who strive to get only the best.
This year, we had hopes that the competition between the pair of top companies would be even fiercer thanks to MediaTek’s use of TSMC’s ultra-advanced N4P (or 4nm Enhanced) manufacturing process – but according to the performance comparison from the first reviews of the Vivo X90 Pro device it seems that The Dimensity 9200 will have a hard time challenging the superiority of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, despite the fact that the latter uses “only” TSMC’s 4nm N4 manufacturing process.
According to gsmarena reviews, the Vivo X90 Pro with the Dimensity 9200 scored 10 to 15 percent lower than various Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices in the popular Geekbench 5 multi-core test, and also scored 7 to 10 percent lower in tests for Single core – despite the fact that it uses a very similar setup with one senior Cortex-X3 core, several powerful Cortex-A715 cores and several Cortex-A510 cores as economical as the competitor.
In the GFXBench graphics processing tests, an even more significant gap was observed in favor of the S8G2, with about 10 to 22 percent in Offscreen mode that eliminates the effect of display resolution for a fairer comparison, with the gap under Vulkan infrastructure being significantly larger than the gap under OpenGL ES (but in both cases The Dimensity 9200 graphics core is closer in performance to the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 than to Gen 2).
Tests in which MediaTek’s leading chip flourished relatively were AnTuTu and 3DMark, but even there the results were close to identical to those of the average S8G2 model but not high enough to occupy the first place.
Image source: gsmarena.com
The most disappointing figure in the Vivo X90 Pro is the battery life, where according to gsmarena’s well-known comprehensive test, its results are less good than those of any of the seven Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices that have been tested on the same platform so far – especially in the segment of call time in cellular connectivity and the average operating time in the mode waiting. It is possible that Vivo itself is partially to blame here for not matching the operating system correctly to the processing chip, but considering a relatively wide sample of Snapdragon models from different manufacturers that all bypassed the Dimensity 9200 device, the chance of a point error seems lower.
Image source: gsmarena.com
Could it be that MediaTek would have been better off favoring the more mature and mature N4 manufacturing process over choosing to be the first to boast a nanometer N4P process that hadn’t been commercially tested on a large scale before? Let’s hope for some more reviews of Dimensity devices in the near future that will help shed more light on the subject.
There is a possibility that the Vivo X90 Pro does not allow the Dimension 9200 chip to exhaust all of its capabilities due to efficiency considerations, cooling considerations or even software that is not mature and sufficiently adapted to the hardware – but when it comes to differences of a few tens of percent in the results within some of the most common tests, It’s quite hard to believe that a test in the context of some other smart device could change the picture completely and place the model from MediaTek clearly at the top.
Despite this, the Dimensity 9200 still looks like a powerful and very relevant modern product, which keeps its key in the game and should allow it to gain considerable interest from the various device manufacturers in China and perhaps also outside of it – all that is required to provide the infrastructure for another attempt to conquer the summit with The Dimension 9300 (or a chip with another model name) towards 2024.