Turbo GPU: 14 Huawei phones are about to get a big boost of speed

Generally speaking, when you buy a phone, open the box and turn it on marks the climax of your relationship. For the next two years, you can expect bumps, scratches and a gradual slowing down to make you feel more and more jaded, until something newer and brighter slips into your pocket. Sunrise, sunset

If we believe Huawei, the Chinese giant smartphone is about to seriously compromise this trend with something he calls Turbo GPU. Initially announced for the next Honor Play smartphone, an upgrade will be made to some devices powered by Kirin via an OTA update. The company is very vague about what it's actually doing, but the results are expected to increase both the graphics performance and the battery life during 3D rendering. Huawei claims that devices with the update will pump the pixels 60% faster, while improving the battery by 30%.

This is a pretty bold statement that should be taken with a pinch of salt until we can test our devices. but more for your money would certainly be welcome. The Kirin 970 processor for example, which powers the excellent P20 Pro and the mediocre P20, is certainly not left behind, but it is far behind the last Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with respect to graphics performance, being a competitor closer to the 835 chip of last year.

As you can see in the graph above, the P20 Pro (Kirin 970) is quite similar to the OnePlus 5T (Snapdragon 835) but the OnePlus 6, with its Snapdragon 845 processor, is far ahead. Although it should be noted that this does not make much difference in everyday use, the given frame rates are capped at 60fps in most smartphones anyway. In any case, Huawei believes that it can fill this largely theoretical gap and we look forward to testing by ourselves when improvements will be implemented.

So, which phones will receive the update and when? Fourteen Huawei phones receive GPU Turbo processing.