Honor 10 gets a serious performance and battery boost with GPU Turbo

Honor is doing something special this month. Starting with the Honor 10, it’s going to give its flagship phones a massive speed boost. Not only that, but it’s going to boost their battery life too. How does 60% faster GPU performance and 30% less battery consumption sound?

We haven’t been eating cheese before bedtime: those are real numbers. It’s all about what Honor calls GPU Turbo, and we think you’re going to love it.

What is GPU Turbo and why should I care about it?

Modern phones really hammer the graphics processing unit, or GPU for short. Whether it’s rendering HDR for beautiful video, providing the sheer grunt required for 3D gaming or unleashing the necessary hardware horsepower for AR and VR apps, the GPU is what makes so much mobile magic happen. If you can make it work better, you can make the entire mobile experience better. And that’s exactly what GPU Turbo does.

With GPU Turbo, Honor has found a way to make the GPU more efficient and more effective. By doing so it doesn’t just boost the performance to deliver smoother visuals and better frame rates. It reduces power consumption too. That means better gaming, video, AR and VR, and more battery power to enjoy the improvements.

GPU Turbo boosts everyday performance and consumption too, but it’s the power users who’ll notice it the most. No matter what you’re doing, though, your phone will be more responsive, smoother and longer lasting.

What other benefits does GPU Turbo bring?

It’s effectively a hardware upgrade that doesn’t require you to buy any hardware. Games and other apps that might have been too demanding to run entirely happily on your device should now be silky smooth. It’s the complete opposite of what tends to happen with mobile phones, with apps becoming so demanding that only the very latest hardware can handle them. According to Honor, GPU Turbo does its job so well that it enables older phones to outperform newer devices with more powerful GPUs. Going forward, GPU Turbo will be one of the core features in Honor smartphones, which should make rivals very worried indeed.

How does GPU Turbo work?

That’s a very good question, and Honor won’t go into specifics beyond telling us that it’s “revolutionary graphics processing acceleration” because it doesn’t want rivals to start their photocopiers. What we do know, though, is that Honor is very good at optimising software to get more performance from hardware: its tweaks to its EMUI software layer do great things with Android. With GPU Turbo it’s found a way to make the System on a Chip (SoC) run at lower temperatures and with less jitter: that enables it to ramp up performance without sacrificing smoothness.

When can you get it?

If you’ve got an Honor 10, you most likely will get GPU Turbo at the end of this month. Other Honor phones will get the update shortly afterwards, so if you’ve got an Honor View 10, 9 or 9 Lite, you can get excited too.

To find out more about GPU Turbo and the Honor 10, see here