Google’s Pixel 10 arrives with a new graphics brain, and for emulator fans that development is a step backward. With its transition from Arm’s Mali designs to Imagination Technologies’ DXT-48-1536 GPU in the Tensor G5, Google has flipped one of the cores of its platform. On paper and at a distance, the switch offered efficiency and a nice speed bump. In real-world testing, the Pixel 10’s GPU throttles sooner, stutters more, and goes out of spec in ways that the Pixel 9 simply didn’t.
What Happened Inside Tensor G5’s Graphics Subsystem
The Tensor G5’s Arm rendering processor is replaced with an Imagination DXT engine—a tile-based deferred renderer from a company with impressive IP and spotty Android driver history.
This is important as emulators are far more dependent on API correctness, shader compilation, and low jitter than they are on flashy peak benchmarks. Synthetic scores tell a tale of a 20–30% graphics uplift; emulation workloads, though, paint the nuances as driver maturity concerns play against it, along with scheduling and DVFS decisions.
Those nuances manifest as “race-to-idle” patterns, clock residency, and how aggressively the phone clamps frequencies in response to temperatures. With the Pixel 10, something may be off: clocks crash sooner and harder, and frame pacing slips even when thermals are not that terrible.
Emulation benchmarks reveal real-world performance gaps
Begin with Dolphin and Mario Kart Wii. With OpenGL rendering running internally at 4x resolution, the Pixel 10 opens with a smooth if unspectacular 60fps before dropping to the high 50s mid-challenge and below 40fps on my fourth race. Emulators lock game speed to frame rate, so that dip isn’t just for appearances — it’s slowdown.
Recapitulating the run on the Pixel 9 inverts expectations. The older Mali GPU is jankier off the line but still, by the first three races, hits a solid 60fps and remains in the 40–50fps range with race four — about 20% faster than the Pixel 10 in this segment. And telemetry reveals why — after about 6.5 minutes, the Pixel 10’s GPU smacks into a hard floor around 630MHz while internal temperatures hover around 35°C; the Pixel 9 sustains peak clocks for longer before backing off at ~38°C, and even then only to ~750MHz from a still-impressive top frequency of 900MHz.
Another Dolphin staple, F-Zero GX, emphasizes the difference even more. The Pixel 9 is somewhere just short of a locked 60fps. The Pixel 10 swings between 40 and 60fps with drops below the latter framerate right out of the gate. Clock residency analysis shows that here, the Mali GPU is in an almost 50 percent idle state — plenty of headroom to expand into — and that’s with the DXT core hammering higher average clocks (15–25%) but producing fewer frames, which screams driver or pipeline inefficiency as opposed to a raw performance bottleneck.
Switching to Vulkan doesn’t save the day on Pixel 10
Newer emulation software heavily prefers Vulkan for lower CPU overhead, and the Dolphin project has been promoting it when drivers cooperate. Switching APIs paid dividends for the Pixel 9 everywhere but in one key area. It didn’t save the Pixel 10.
AetherSX2 (a community fork running on the PCSX2 codebase) and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, too, will be at an advantage with the Tensor G5’s more powerful CPU complex. But the Pixel 10 simply can’t stay at a consistent frame rate; it will fluctuate between 40 and 60fps, then definitely drop below 30fps within three minutes once thermal limits are reached. The Pixel 9, on the other hand, mostly holds at 60fps with the occasional drop to the high 40s — not perfect, but playable.
Support for Vulkan shows an even greater disparity. On the Pixel 9, frame pacing improves yet further, with 60fps locks now common. On the Pixel 10, some runs tank to around 25fps; that’s close to unplayable. More warning bells crop up when it comes to features: Turn on anti-aliasing with OpenGL and one Dolphin workload crashes on the Pixel 10, while turning on AA with Vulkan results in missing textures — neither of which happens with the Pixel 9. That’s classic “driver maturity” territory.
Why The DXT Is Having Difficulty And What Can Get Better
The reason seems to be one of three culprits: immature graphics drivers, too-aggressive thermal governance, or synchronization overhead between the CPU and GPU.
First, driver maturity. Emulator workloads build and switch many shaders on the fly, exercising older OpenGL ES paths in addition to Vulkan. It’s something that groups such as the Dolphin team have mentioned many times — correct and stable shader compilers are more important than peak TFLOPs. Imagination’s Android DDK has gotten better over the years, but consider that it hasn’t had the hardening of Arm’s Mali (and Qualcomm’s Adreno) through many device cycles.
Second, DVFS policy. The early drop from 1.1GHz to only 630MHz at mild temperatures (68°F) signifies an overly conservative limit, or not enough margin in cooling for extended, higher-performance workloads before encountering thermal throttling limits. When clocks fall, emulators falter: the game clock can’t outrun the thermal governor. By contrast, the Pixel 9’s more gradual step-down maintains playability longer.
Third, CPU–GPU sync. The CPU gains on the Tensor G5 don’t carry over because we see that the GPU seems to be busier for more of each frame. This increases frame latency and reduces idle residency, which manifests as high average GPU clocks with degraded output. Firmware, kernel schedulers, and DDK updates can mitigate that, and there’s precedent for graphics driver changes causing double-digit swings in emulator performance.
What to Consider When Purchasing the Best Emulator
If you care about Dolphin, AetherSX2, or any high-end emulation, the Pixel 10 is a tough recommendation right now. The Pixel 9 is still deceptively beefy, and competing top-shelf flagships have a strong established reputation with Adreno drivers for Vulkan and OpenGL ES in emulator circles. Unless Google and Imagination push out a whole bunch of driver and thermal policy fixes, the smarter play for retro gaming is last year’s Pixel or any other Android flagship.
The Tensor G5’s shift to Imagination might still bear long-term fruit when it comes to updates. As of right now, the data is clear: previous throttling, uneven frame pacing issues, and API quirks make the Pixel 10 a poor bet for game emulation — even if it appears “fast” in synthetic charts.
