At the same time, we saw mobile gaming revenue on the rise, gaming-centric phones are clearly an endangered species, with basically Asus and ZTE/Nubia left in the game.
With MWC 2025 past us and no gaming phone launched at the event, one can argue that it was a category that arrived at the market due to two generations of overheating mobile chips, but we digress.
Long seen as the underdog of the mobile world, MediaTek didn’t have a processor capable of powering high-end phones at the time. But over the past five years, it has quickly risen to challenge Qualcomm. Not only does the Taiwanese company lead in SoC shipments, but it also now offers chips that can compete for the performance crown.
We had a quick chat with Rob Moffat, Director of Sales & Business Development Europe at MediaTek to learn more about how gaming in particular is driving changes in how the company designs chips, and what is next in mobile gaming.
Local vs. Cloud Gaming
When asked about the split between on-device and cloud gaming, Moffat was straight to the point: Due to latency, accessibility, and connectivity concerns, on-device gaming is still king, even on mobile phones.
“However, we can expect significant growth in the cloud gaming market as internet infrastructure improves and advancements in 5G continue. Reduced latency, higher bandwidth, and improved speeds enable users to play and stream a wider range of games, including graphically intensive ones, without the need for powerful local hardware.”
That view is slightly different from its rival Qualcomm, which spread its competing offerings into both segments. Including “Snapdragon G” processors with more modest CPU and GPU cores, with an emphasis on cloud streaming.
Learning From Desktop GPUs
Moffat highlighted new features introduced with the company’s Dimensity 9400 GPU—the ARM Immortalis-G925 core—such as the Super Resolution upscaler and Frame Rate Converter to provide more (and smoother) frames with more energy efficiency.
Super Resolution, like its desktop counterparts Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS, creates additional image detail based on video frames to present a higher-resolution image.
Details are short on the Frame Rate Converter side, but it seems to do the same for the fluidity of gaming scenes, interpolating video frames based on motion estimation, like DLSS Frame Generation or AMD Fluid Motion Frames. On those systems, the GPU creates frames by presuming where each object is moving in relation to each other, giving the impression of a smoother gameplay experience.
When it comes to cloud gaming, he reminded us that stand-alone (SA) 5G—a “pure” network, without legacy 4G/LTE equipment—should lower latency (aka lag), and that Wi-Fi 7 features such as MLO (multi-link operation) allows for snappier, less-congested connections in the home.
Faster controls as well
Latency, however, is not only experienced on the network connection but also in our input devices. To tackle that, Razer, LG, and MediaTek recently announced a partnership to develop an Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) Bluetooth controller for very fast—allegedly 1ms input lag—response times.
BT ULL, however, is still in the development stage and currently has no timeline to reach store shelves. The tech, however, could not only improve input latency on mobile phones but also on other displays such as smart TVs, which in many cases offer barebones support for Bluetooth input devices.
As a side note, the Taiwanese company is also a major player in the TV segment, with its Pentonic chips powering TV sets from Sony, Panasonic, and many other major brands.
Faster Connections on Wi-Fi and Cellular
With console and PC gaming looking increasingly more expensive (and with no signs of ever going back), mobile gaming should only become more and more popular. And what better way to do that than to use all the available connections?
We have seen Wi-Fi 7 promising faster and lower latency connections using MLO, but mobile SoCs can also switch to cellular connectivity as well. Usually, Wi-Fi is a better option due to lower energy consumption and latency, but mobile data can offer better range on the go, and can be more reliable (especially if your relatives or roommate is also a bandwidth-heavy internet user).
Modern mobile chips are equipped with algorithms to detect which connection can offer the best balance between latency, reliability, and power consumption. Moffat highlighted that MediaTek’s Smart Link Dispatching can even use a combination of cellular data and Wi-Fi to keep the phone connected.
Balancing All the Processing Units
Speaking of combining different technologies, a modern SoC is the sum of many building blocks, usually represented by three-letter-acronyms (TLA): CPU, GPU, NPU, ISP, etc. A recent trend by both Qualcomm and MediaTek saw flagship chips abandoning the usage of small, efficiency CPU cores, to go all in with “big cores”.
A common fear since the launch of the Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon 8 Elite is that using only performance cores, devices would get even hotter than before. But for most tasks, the CPU can typically go into a lower-power state after processing is done to save power (and heat). Using “big cores” does have an impact on the size of the chip, especially when equipped with large memory caches.
When it comes to raw performance, especially in games, it is better to have many fast cores than to simply have one of two of them, as long as the title supports balancing the processing load among them. Behind the scenes, the chip will also have to balance power consumption, allocating energy to the different cores according to the processing needs of the app, including the GPU, NPU, and other processing blocks.
“The challenge lies in effectively utilizing each of the core’s functions without overworking any of them, which requires detailed and thought-out management of power, task allocation and thermal control.”
Moffat reminded us that not all games will benefit from having multiple cores at their disposal, but it is still important to have a sufficient number of them for multithreaded processing. And on a typical mobile phone, there are other regular tasks running in the background, with Android still taking care of managing background apps, like messaging and calendar notifications for example.
More Efficient Phones
In the end, despite being designed with gaming first, most of these features can also improve other tasks in our phones. Better battery management, smarter allocation of connectivity, lower latency for accessories or video calls, or even improving photo & video capturing using some of the techniques to upscale the latest AAA game.
We thank Rob Moffat and his team for the time to answer our questions and his insights.
What do you think of how gaming is evolving on mobile? Do you miss the bulky gaming phones of the past? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
