This Android gaming benchmark app does something I’ve never seen before

I love benchmarks a little too much and use them on every new phone I test. Synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench and 3DMark do a good job of simulating real-world usage and gaming scenarios, and they predict a device’s performance potential quite well. As someone who gets over 75 phones a year, a synthetic benchmark lets me easily gauge how a given device stacks up against its predecessor.

There is a new benchmark that aims to go beyond just providing an overall score. It’s called Evolve, and it provides useful insights across five metrics, allowing you to then figure out which part of the GPU is handling modern workloads well, and which is causing a potential bottleneck. I tested it with several phones, including the Find X9 Ultra, Find X9 Pro, Find X8 Pro, and the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and it did a good job of showing how much (and where) mobile GPUs have evolved over the past two years.

We’re starting to see ray tracing on mobile, and Arm and Qualcomm are going all-in on neural rendering, using techniques like frame generation to bring higher framerates to mobile titles. It is in this area where Evolve comes into its own; it has a dedicated score that takes into account all the hardware-accelerated ray tracing workloads — lighting, shadows, and reflections — done via Vulkan Raytracing and DXR APIs, and it does a good job of indicating how well a phone handles ray tracing in general. There is also an Acceleration Structure Score that evaluates how quickly the GPU builds all the data structures needed for ray tracing.

Similarly, Evolve has a rasterization score that tests the hardware rasterizer (which is dedicated to 3D graphics), a test that measures animation, graphics effects and post-processing scenarios, and a driver score that measures how efficiently the CPU is used. The idea with all these tests is to provide a realistic representation of how a particular mobile GPU holds up during gaming. Evolve itself is free, but like 3DMark there is a professional version that allows you to export charts and all test data, and that’s what I used.

I tested the last two generations of Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets with Evolve. That includes the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Find X9 Ultra), Dimensity 9500 (Find X9 Pro), Snapdragon 8 Elite (Xiaomi 15 Ultra), and the Dimensity 9400 (Find X8 Pro).

As the Evolve charts only mention the GPU (which is what it tests anyway), a quick overview: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has the Adreno 840, the Dimensity 9500 has the Mali G1, the Snapdragon 8 Elite uses the Adreno 830, and the Mal9092 has the . With that out of the way, let’s look at the scores.

It should come as no surprise that Qualcomm absolutely dominates the charts; the last two generations of Adreno GPUs have provided a significant boost in performance, and this is reflected in the score. The Adreno 840 is 27% faster at ray tracing workloads than the Mali G1, 40% faster at rasterization, and it has a similarly distinguished 46% lead in GPU computing. Of course, it doesn’t mean that the Adreno 840 is 40% better at gaming than the G1; in real-world gaming situations, the difference is much closer than that. It’s just that the Adreno 840 has much better headroom, and this becomes evident in sustained gaming scenarios.

What’s remarkable to me is just how much of a year-over-year difference there is between the Adreno 830 and Adreno 840; the latter performs 1.47 times better in rasterization workloads, and 85% better in ray tracing. Also interesting to see is how the Mali G1 fares against the last-gen G925 Immortalis; Arm announced a 2x increase in ray tracing with the G1, and this is evident in the scores. That said, the G1 doesn’t have a drastic uptick in other areas – certainly not on the same scale as what Qualcomm achieved with the Adreno 840.

Another thing Evolve does well is show how much GPU time was used per frame in each workload; this is useful because it just shows you what the GPU is taxing. In the case of the Adreno 840, 27.7% was spent on ray tracing, just over 17% on rasterization, and most of the time (45.7%) was dedicated to GPU compute. With the Mali-G925, over 50% was dedicated to ray tracing as it does not have the required cores to handle this workload. These charts are interesting because they detail just where a particular GPU is struggling, and it’s great to see this level of granularity.

Evolve also has an energy score that measures how much power the GPU uses when running a workload. This is useful for testing on mobile chipsets, as they must be energy efficient by their inherent design. That said, the feature wasn’t available on the phones I used, so I spoke to Jasper Bekkers, founder of Evolve, to get a better understanding of what’s going on. He said: “To calculate the energy score, Evolve reads the current power data of the device through the Android Power Stats HAL. Some manufacturers do not display this, and instead of guessing based on the battery API, we leave the score on these devices.

Looking at these charts, I can’t help but be excited about what’s to come with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Dimensity 9600 Pro. Both platforms have switched to the 2nm node, with Qualcomm and MediaTek claiming next-generation GPU gains. I use the Dimensity 9600 Pro (it’s a beast) and will talk more about it in the coming weeks, and Qualcomm’s 2027 flagship chipset should get a global release relatively soon, so I’m looking forward to testing phones with these designs.