MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 is designed to compete head-to-head with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and it’s doing so by playing hardball on two things that are currently really important to a premium phone: next-gen imaging and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The silicon is home to a revamped CPU/GPU complex, an AI-first pipeline and a camera stack that reads like a wish list for mobile creators.
Counterpoint Research still ranks MediaTek as the largest smartphone chip vendor by shipments, but the company’s aspirations for higher-end processors have been benchmarked against Qualcomm’s graphics and its staying power in sustained performance. With Dimensity 9500, MediaTek isn’t just trying to catch up on clocks; it is staking a legitimate position in well-defined and measurable upgrades where users can see it — video, portraits, smoother and more realistic gaming.
CPU wins and AI acceleration where it matters
The Dimensity 9500 goes one step further with an Arm C1‑Ultra core at 4.21GHz, along with three C1‑Premium cores at 3.5GHz and four C1‑Pro cores at 2.7GHz.
Beyond sheer numbers, cache is important: MediaTek provides ample per‑core L2 (up to 2MB on the prime) and adds up to 16MB of L3 as well as doubling L1, helping the chip avoid a bottleneck when switching between large bursts of tasks such as camera capture and game scene loads.
MediaTek says it will offer 32% faster single‑core and ~16% quicker multi‑core performance compared to its previous flagship, while slashing peak power consumption by 37%, with draw from the prime core reduced by over 55%. That’s notable because it goes directly to supporting longer high‑fps gaming sessions and more thermally stable performance for 4K recording or on-device editing.
Most importantly, though, the CPU includes Arm’s SME2 extensions. SME2 is a group of vectorized instructions that accelerate AI‑adjacent math on the CPU side, to complement the NPU. Arm has already implemented SME2 in its Kleidi libraries and core frameworks, enabling developers to make use of these performance benefits without having to rewrite pipelines. MediaTek claims SME2 increases object detection throughput by 57% while halving power in some encode/decode model workloads — handy for live camera features and background AI tasks.
For dedicated AI, the NPU 990 doubles raw performance and now supports an enormous 128,000‑token context window for really huge models and 4K image processing. There is a new compute‑in‑memory “super‑efficient” NPU to execute tiny always‑on models with up to 42% reduced power and BitNet 1‑bit support for ultra‑low precision (down to 1.58‑bit) inference that MediaTek claims reduces power by ~50% and shrinks the storage footprint of on‑device AI.
Ray tracing, with some of VALORANT’s new gaming technology
The GPU is the Arm Mali G1‑Ultra MC12, which the company says brings 33% higher peak performance and 42% better power efficiency, but a headline leap of 119% in ray tracing throughput. That’s the kind of uplift that makes RT go from a tech demo to something developers can actually build around for shadows, reflections and global illumination.
MediaTek claims it’ll hit up to 120fps in ray‑traced titles through use of frame rate interpolation — effectively doubling the perceived smoothness from a lower, native rate. For purists, there must be native high fps; however, for a phone, it’s a practical way to keep power and thermals under control. Unreal Engine 5.5/5.6 and Vulkan 1.4 are supported; the Khronos Group’s Host Image Copy in Vulkan 1.4 moves some transfers to the CPU, easing GPU stutter during texture streaming — supposedly cutting down on hitching in open‑world environments.
Mobile RT adoption is still nascent, but the momentum is there. NetEase’s Justice Mobile has been demonstrating high-fidelity lighting on top‑end Android for some time and the broader engine‑level support makes it easier to ship RT versions. With the 9500, look for more publishers to experiment with hybrid RT effects without scaring away all of the frames.
Imaging pipeline built for the mobile creator
The ISP stack now works in the RAW domain prior to demosaicing, which means all the signal‑based stuff such as noise reduction, HDR fusion and tone mapping have more room to play. The payoff: cleaner images at night, and skin tones that stay more consistent before the image is run through the encoder. The tally tops out at 200MP, and while MediaTek is keen to talk about the multi‑frame processing that can be achieved at such heights rather than just single‑shot bragging rights, it doesn’t say much at all about what we have reason to suspect isn’t that great an experience.
The 9500 is really designed to be a video machine. There’s 4K/60 portrait video — which demands rapid depth estimation and subject segmentation per frame — and what MediaTek is describing as Android’s first 4K/120 Dolby Vision capture with electronic stabilization. Even dedicated cameras rarely achieve that combination. For reference, a lot of mobile “cinematic” modes are limited to 4K/30, so the portrait mode is unlocking smoother motion while maintaining that depth‑of‑field look.
Oppo and Vivo have both already teased flagships based on Dimensity 9500 silicon, with Oppo mentioning 200MP multi‑frame capture and Vivo signaling 4K/60 portrait. If those features do land as touted, they will immediately put pressure on rivals to step up their game when it comes to computational video pipelines.
Connectivity and platform polish for daily use
The platform does support UFS 4.1 in four‑lane configuration for better parallel throughput — useful when wrangling app restores, camera bursts and game assets. The integrated modem supports 7.4Gbps downlink and 5‑carrier aggregation with a 15% increase in bandwidth, while AI‑tuned power controls target reducing 5G and Wi‑Fi energy draw during idle and background syncs.
Quality‑of‑life touches include an “Android‑first” one‑nit minimum display brightness for gentler low‑light viewing, and a claimed 35% extension in Bluetooth audio range — conceivably with the effect of reducing dropout rates when using ANC earbuds on busy RF bands.
Bottom line: A real Snapdragon challenger
Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs have been at the forefront of mobile graphics for years; however, the Dimensity 9500’s 119 percent ray tracing leap and Vulkan 1.4‑ready stack are meaningful steps forward.
Paired with SME2‑aware CPU acceleration, a more powerful NPU and a camera pipeline delivering 4K/60 portrait and 4K/120 Dolby Vision, MediaTek has created a flagship SoC that is competitive where it matters.
