The Google Pixel 10 series brings a familiar polish and plenty of new features, but its most interesting, and arguably most controversial, change lies deep inside the Tensor G5 chip. Google has ditched its long-standing partnership with Arm’s Mali GPU range in favor of Imagination Technologies’ DXT-48-1536 graphics unit. On paper, that’s a major shift — but after a week of testing, I’m not convinced it’s for the better.
At first, everything seemed fine. The Pixel 10 Pro XL handles popular Android games smoothly enough, with no significant slowdowns or stability issues during my short tests. But things started to look less rosy when I dug deeper, especially into emulator performance.
To see if there was more to it, I upgraded my performance testing setup and pitted the new Pixel 10 Pro XL against last year’s Pixel 9 Pro XL — a phone with surprisingly solid emulation performance. The video at the top of this article showcases clips from the same data plotted on the graphs throughout this article.
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Dolphin emulation test
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
My performance curiosities were first piqued while trying out Mario Kart Wii on the Dolphin emulator. I left the renderer on OpenGL and set the output resolution to 4x for a crisp, native look on the phone’s large display. Technically, both GPUs might fare a little better under Vulkan (Arm in particular is a big advocate), but since OpenGL remains the stable default API for most emulators and popular mobile titles, I stuck with it for testing.
Midway through the third race on the 10 Pro XL, the silky 60fps sheen started to fray, dipping to 50fps and falling below 40fps by the time I’d started the fourth round. For regular games, that might be tolerable; for emulation, where frame rate directly ties to the game clock, it means visible slowdowns and sluggish gameplay that runs slower than real time.
Running the same 150cc Flower Cup on last year’s Pixel 9 Pro XL highlights the issue further. While it’s a little jankier at the start of races, the older Mali GPU maintained near-constant 60fps through the first three races, with only the occasional microstutter. Come the fourth race, performance definitely started to suffer, but still held up between 40 and 50fps, making it 20% or even faster than the Pixel 10.
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