One year of updates couldn’t save the Pixel 10’s GPU — and now the Pixel 11 is at risk

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The Pixel 10 series may be Google’s best phones yet, but gamers got the short end of the stick. The Tensor G5 marked Google’s switch away from Arm’s Mali GPUs in favor of Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR architecture — specifically the mid-range, already aging DXT-48-1536.

With the Pixel 11 launch approaching, one question keeps nagging at me: will history repeat itself? Rumors suggest the Tensor G6 will use another modest PowerVR GPU, the CXTP-48-1536. If Google’s recent trajectory is anything to go by, the Pixel 11 could fall even further behind rival flagship GPUs.

That’s hardly encouraging for anyone who takes mobile gaming seriously. My biggest concern isn’t peak performance, though. We all know that Google is far more invested in AI silicon and camera processing capabilities when it comes to picking its priorities. Instead, what I’m anxious about is whether Google has ironed out issues that dogged its transition to PowerVR series GPUs almost one year ago.

Rewind to the launch of the Pixel 10 series, and gaming was a mixed bag. General performance wasn’t as bad as many feared. Games like PUBG Mobile, COD Mobile, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Diablo Immortal were all perfectly playable. It never descended into the chaos of Samsung Eynos’s AMD Xclipse debut , where some games barely ran at all.

However, my early experience was far from issue-free. I noticed antialiasing glitches while playing COD Mobile’s Battle Royale mode at higher graphics settings, causing foliage to flicker in and out of existence. Perhaps more alarming was that performance on some of Android’s best-maintained emulators went from reasonably smooth to outright unplayable. The difference was stark. My Pixel 9 Pro XL maintained near-locked 60 fps in Dolphin’s F-Zero GX. The Pixel 10 Pro XL bounced between 40 and 60fps, with frequent drops below 30fps.

Even switching to Vulkan, often the faster graphics backend, failed to deliver comparable performance with its last-gen sibling. In fact, enabling anti-aliasing under OpenGL crashed F-Zero GX on launch, while Vulkan produced missing textures when AA was enabled. Neither was an issue with my Pixel 9 Pro XL, pointing to some rather severe issues with early PowerVR drivers.

Combined with more aggressive performance throttling than its predecessor, the early impressions of the Pixel 10 series were really quite disappointing.