In July MediaTek announced two of its two new gaming socs for the first time, Helio G90 & G90T. Both of the chipsets are designated for gaming, and these are the (only) immediate competitors to Qualcomm’s latest Mid-range SoCs, Snapdragon 730G.
Since this is MediaTek, prices of devices powered by the chipsets will be much lower than devices running Qualcomm’s 730G SoC – look at Redmi Note 8 Pro price as an example.
But performance-wise, who wins this battle? Because performance is the ultimate consideration (among other factors, of course) that should drive your purchasing decision for any smartphone. Throwing away your hard-earned cash is intolerable!
MediaTek’s history in the mid-range smartphone market has not been well, but at least there is something to be proud of with the new Helio chipsets.
Here is a comparison of how MediaTek’s Helio G90T compares with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 730G SoC.
Based on Antuntu’s performance benchmark, MediaTek Helio G90 T powering Redmi Note 8 Pro scored a total of 281,033 points, which blows away Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730SoC by over 60,000 points.
Taking a stab into the GPU and CPU performance, MediaTek Mali G76 GPU scored 79,755 points while the CPU recorded a score of 95,762. The whole duo still proves to be better than Qualcomm’s CPU and GPU performance on benchmarks. If you’re a gaming fan, you know what that means – Mediatek’s SoC performs better than Qualcomm’s latest SoC.
What’s the catch?
However, does that mean it is all honey and milk in the MediaTek world? As usual, there are still some disadvantages with MediaTek’s SoC, that you will have to bear with – this is MediaTek. Firstly, Helio G90 and G90T are made with 12nm manufacturing process which is not power efficient as compared to the 8nm SDM 730 – Xiaomi knows this and is the primary reason why Redmi Note 8 Pro has a bigger battery capacity.
In supported features, Qualcomm’s SDM 730 looks more superior than Helio G90T, accommodating Up to Quad HD (3360 x 1440 pixels) HDR 10 display, NFC, USB Type-C and relies on X15 LTE modem that uses LTE Cat-15 with download speeds up to 800Mbps. On matters photography, Helio G90T supports either 24MP + 16MP dual-camera setup or a single 64 MP camera.
On the other hand, SDM 730 SoC supports up to 22MP dual camera or a single 192MP single-camera – a lens that is still, well, non-existent. Although MediaTek Helio G90T can accommodate up to 10GB of LPDDR4X RAM clocked at 2133MHz while QSDM 730 can only accommodate up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM clocking at higher frequency(3733MHz).
Price
In any electronic device, pricing does matter. See, if you want better value for money devices as per now, MediaTek Helio G90 series chipsets should be your go-to alternative. To put this in perspective, an 8/128GB model of Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro is priced at around Ksh 25,000 while a Snapdragon 730 powered smartphone – Redmi K20 also called MI 9T 6GB/128GB model is priced around Ksh 40,000.