Google Pixel 10’s GPU struggles might stem from old drivers

Despite switching to TSMC’s more efficient process node, the Pixel 10‘s Tensor G5 failed to deliver notable gains in performance and battery life. With its newest SoC, Google also moved away from Arm’s Mali GPU to one from Imagination Technologies. The new GPU has sparked debate among Pixel 10 owners, as it struggles to outperform even last year’s Pixel 9 — with many pointing out that its clock speed appears to be capped absurdly low, limiting its expected performance.

Google uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR DXT-48-1536 GPU on the Tensor G5 inside the Pixel 10. On paper, this is a relatively powerful GPU, supporting hardware ray tracing — which Google didn’t implement for some reason, Vulkan 1.3, tile-based deferred rendering, and a theoretical 1.5 TFLOPS FP32 performance at 1GHz. In practice, though, the GPU falls far short of its promised potential and does not deliver performance anywhere near what the specs suggest.

For comparison, the Pixel 10 Pro manages just 3,707 points in Geekbench’s GPU benchmark — barely a third of the Pixel 9 Pro‘s 9,023 score. Both these scores are notably less than the Galaxy S25’s 26,000+ score.

As many frustrated Pixel 10 users on Reddit have discovered, the Pixel 10’s PowerVR GPU appears stuck at its idle frequency of 396MHz even under heavy load, far below its rated 1GHz clock speed. And due to this, it seems to perform worse than even most mid-range Android phones in GPU-intensive tasks.

Despite numerous reports from Pixel 10 owners about the poor GPU performance and unusually low clock speeds, Google has yet to officially acknowledge the issue.

Pixel 10’s outdated GPU driver may be the real culprit

The problem possibly stems from the Pixel 10 shipping with an outdated driver (v24.3) for the PowerVR DXT-48-1536 GPU. Imagination Technologies rolled out a new driver (v25.1) for the GPU in August, adding Android 16 compatibility, Vulkan 1.4 support, and broader OpenCL features.

In the past, Google has rolled out GPU driver updates for Tensor chips as part of major Android releases, delivering significant performance improvements. So, the company could do something similar with the Pixel 10’s PowerVR GPU and address its poor performance. Ideally, the Pixel 10 should have shipped with PowerVR’s latest v25.1 driver, especially since it adds Android 16 support.

Google usually bundles new GPU drivers with a beta Android release before rolling them out in the stable build. Google hasn’t released an Android 16 QPR2 beta build for the Pixel 10 yet. So, there’s a chance the updated GPU driver could arrive with the next beta before being pushed out to the public as part of the December Feature Drop.