MediaTek has a lot of ground to cover before it can get anywhere close to the likes of HiSilicon or Qualcomm. The Taiwan-based company's chipsets often find their way in budget or mid-range devices, and their flagship chips often cannot compete with even an upper-mid-range Qualcomm equivalent. Today, MediaTek announced the release of its latest gaming-centric chipsets—the Helio G90 and G90T. The move comes shortly after Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 855 Plus; an upgraded version of the flagship SoC with an overclocked CPU and GPU to offer even better gaming performance. Let's take a look at what each chip has to offer.
MediaTek Helio G90 Series and HyperEngine Game Technology
The new Helio G90 series is MediaTek's 'gaming' upgrade to their flagship Helio P90 SoC. The SoC comprises of 2x Cortex-A76 cores clocked @2.05Ghz and 6x Cortex-A55 cores. This is coupled with an ARM Mali G76 3EEMC4 GPU. MediaTek aims to directly compete against the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G in the mid-range segment. Most 'gaming' smartphones on the market are ridiculously overpriced and beyond the reach of most users. The Heilo G90 series should allow OEMs to create a whole new budget gaming smartphone category.
Additionally, the G90 series can include up to 10GB of LPDDR4X RAM clocked at up to 2133MHz and can support up to 64MP single camera or 24MP plus 16MP dual camera configurations, 240fps slo-mo and AI facial detection. The chip also features support for dual wake-up words, allowing phones to build in support for listening to more than one trigger word simultaneously. Lastly, the series supports Cat-12 4G LTE modem with 3X CA and 4X4 MIMO technology. Alongside the launch of the G90 series, MediaTek also unveiled its HyperEngine game technology, which has the following features:
- Networking Engine: Intelligent network prediction optimizes the connection between your smartphone and cellular network. If it detects the Wi-Fi signal degrading, it triggers Wi-Fi and LTE concurrency that takes just milliseconds. This seamless exchange from one connection to the other keeps the network connection smooth and the game lag-free. Even with a crowded network, you’ll get up to a 50% faster response than competing solutions.
- Dual Wi-Fi Connections allows a single smartphone antenna to be connected to two Wi-Fi bands (2.4GHz/5GHz) or two routers simultaneously. This ensures a reliable connection, decreases latency and reduces game jitter.
- Call & Data Concurrency so when your smartphone receives a call, it won’t drop the data connection. You can defer a call without leaving the game. The data connection remains live, and the game server connection never drops, not even for a millisecond.
- Rapid Response Engine uses touch acceleration to improve in-game action-to-display speeds, so the game world is streamed and rendered fast and fluidly. Precise timing control, up to the millisecond, delivers an instant action-to-display experience, faster frame rates and smoother gameplay so you can manoeuvre the game world without any stutter.
- Resource Management Engine intelligently directs device resources including CPU and GPU for optimum performance and automatically delivers smooth, fluid, high-performance frame rates in games. It ensures smoother performance while benefitting power consumption for longer gameplay.
- Picture Quality Engine provides Support for the latest HDR10 standard with 10-bit Color Depth for vivid visuals on HDR-enabled smartphone displays for theatre-like viewing. Deep picture quality enhancements bring better contrast, sharpness, and improved fine details for true-to-life gaming experiences.
Dual WiFi is something I'm looking forward to. It'll be interesting to see if it is marketing fluff or if it makes a measurable difference in gaming performance. The MediaTek G90 Series is set to make its debut on a Xiaomi smartphone in the “near future” in India. You can read more about the chipsets here.
