I have just completed the first round of full benchmarks on a retail vivo X300 Pro, the world’s first Dimensity 9500-powered phone, and unfortunately, it didn’t end well. But despite a generational promise of performance and efficiency in bold print, the raw numbers suggest that there’s cautious optimism at best for professional creative types and almost nothing but red flags for heavy users.
How I Tested the First Dimensity 9500 Phone
To keep things comparable, I used Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6 for CPU benchmarking and UL Solutions’ 3DMark suite with its Wild Life Stress Test, Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, and Solar Bay ray-tracing stress test for GPU and ray-trace load. I was pitting the vivo X300 Pro against a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 reference device, Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, and other recent Dimensity 9400 phones such as the vivo X200 Pro and OPPO Find X8 Pro.
CLICK TO ENLARGE. Reference devices usually have a more relaxed thermal envelope and are performance-biased in terms of tuning. They’re good for bracketing, but commercial phones have the last word in the real world. That contrast matters here.
Chasing Snapdragon performance: CPU results and analysis
In single-core and multi-core tests on Geekbench 6, the X300 Pro trailed the Galaxy S25 Ultra. More surprisingly, however, its single-core score fell just short of phones like the last-generation Dimensity 9400-powered vivo X200 Pro and OPPO Find X8 Pro, though it did post a decidedly higher result in multi-core than these two.
It fared even worse opposite Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 reference platform. The Oryon CPU core design remained a high-water mark to beat for bursty workloads as well as steady-state bandwidth. That’s not an automatic condemnation of the Dimensity 9500, but it does imply that either vivo’s tuning is conservative or the core silicon from MediaTek requires a little more headroom than the X300 Pro is prepared to give it.
A battery-first approach wouldn’t exactly come as a shock given vivo’s track record of favoring camera pipelines and power efficiency over raw compute in its X series. If so, other Dimensity 9500 phones may score higher when tuned to slightly different thermal targets.
GPU and ray tracing results are a mixed bag overall
The X300 Pro also failed to keep up with the peak graphics performance of either the Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device or Galaxy S25 Ultra in 3DMark’s Wild Life Stress Test. Oddly, it also fell short of the X200 Pro’s peak, despite the newer GPU.
The surprise: things were more stable than we expected. The X300 Pro approached 60% stability, ahead of the reference platform (57%) and the Galaxy S25 Ultra (52.5%) and the vivo X200 Pro at 40.3%. It couldn’t quite edge past the Find X8 Pro, but finishing with more gumption than its predecessor implies that the 9500 should still deal with moderate loads decently even if it’s not exactly sprinting away from them.
Wild Life Extreme, by contrast, told a tougher story. Stability dropped to approximately 45%, similar to the X200 Pro (47.1%), Find X8 Pro (57.5%), and S25 Ultra (51.7%). It began with the highest peak in that run — and ended up fading fastest; by the end, only the X200 Pro dropped off lower.
Solar Bay, leaning into ray tracing, mirrored that trend. MediaTek is claiming it made a triple-digit generational leap in ray tracing ability, and the X300 Pro did see an initial surge. But it ended with about 42% battery left — again behind the S25 Ultra, Find X8 Pro, and X200 Pro. Peak frames are great for spec sheets, but it’s stability that gives the perception of a game feeling smooth all the time.
Thermals and stability make only small gains overall
There was scant good news in thermal performance. During runs, I logged maximum temperatures between 42 and 43 degrees Celsius (107 to 109 Fahrenheit) and averages from 37.5 to 40.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 to 105 Fahrenheit). That’s an improvement on the X200 Pro and commensurate with a phone engineered more to avoid hot spots than to scale leaderboard peaks.
There were cooler temps in most scenarios for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, while overall the Find X8 Pro stays cooler. Yet the X300 Pro’s thermal performance suggests that the Dimensity 9500 isn’t inherently unmanageable — it could be really well boxed in by this chassis and firmware approach.
Early verdict for Dimensity 9500 phones based on tests
It feels a little wasted, true, if the Dimensity 9500 inside vivo’s X300 Pro out of the blocks is on the slow side. The CPU results lag behind those of the Snapdragon pack, and early GPU bursts are simply not maintained when challenged with tougher stress tests. But the device’s steadier temps and respectable stability in the lighter Wild Life loop suggest there’s untapped efficiency to be found by other manufacturers willing to use more aggressive cooling and less cautious governors.
I don’t see these numbers as a referendum on MediaTek’s silicon. But they are not standards, just a snapshot of one vendor’s implementation. With Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones already posting solid CPU leadership and durable GPU performance, MediaTek partners will have to push much harder on tuning and thermals to be able to keep up.
I’ll be following to see how OPPO, among others, handles this chip. Past precedent suggests that different industrial designs and firmware policies can yield dramatically different results. If the X300 Pro is any indication, the Dimensity 9500’s potential remains under lock and key behind software locks — and we may only start to see the full unlocking of what it can do in the next wave of phones.
