Google’s Pixel phones have provided clean, consistent software with smart features. But, disappointed by its camera and audio quality, the company’s latest flagship simply failed to meet the standard set by its rivals. More worrying, Anandtech reported that the Pixel 5 was performing less than other devices with the same Snapdragon 765G chipset in benchmark tests. Others blamed the phone’s pre-installed Android 11 operating system. Well, it seems that Google was aware of the criticisms, since its last security update for the Pixel line noticed a significant increase in the performance of the phone’s GPU, according to XDA Developers.
In tweets, editors of Der Standard and Anandtech said the Pixel 5 achieved 30-50% better results or doubled in performance in new benchmark tests, respectively. According to the first, the phone went from a pre-upgrade score of about 2278/2260 for OpenGL / Vulkan testing on 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme to a new total of 3286/3083.
Notably, the April update changelog mentions “performance optimizations for certain applications and games with a lot of graphics”. However, this sounds like an understatement based on the most recent performance results. Google says the update also features better camera quality than the Pixel 5 and 4a 5G in “certain” third-party applications. In addition, there is a fix for an issue in last year’s Pixel 4 line that caused some devices to hang on the Google logo during startup and a patch to appear offline when connected to the VPN (which also applies to Pixel 3 and 3a).