The autumn marathon of premieres in the mobile market continues, and now MediaTek has joined it with its answer to the future Snapdragon 8 Gen 5.
MediaTek has officially announced the Dimensity 9500 — a flagship chipset for the next generation of Android-based smartphones. The company is betting on a combination of high performance, advanced graphics, and energy efficiency.
The Dimensity 9500 is based on the third-generation All Big Core architecture: one ultra-core with a frequency of up to 4.21 GHz, three premium cores and four performance cores, as well as a four-channel UFS 4.1 storage.
According to MediaTek, this set provides up to 32% increase in single-core and up to 17% in multi-core performance compared to the previous generation. At the same time, the ultra-core consumes up to 55% less energy at peak load, which should positively affect the battery life of devices.
The Arm Mali G1-Ultra MC12 is responsible for graphics. According to the company, the new GPU provides a 33% increase in peak performance, 42% in energy efficiency, and 119% in ray tracing performance.
MediaTek also claims support for up to 120 frames per second with ray tracing, promising "console quality" gaming on smartphones. However, specific projects are not named, and the indicator itself is achieved through frame interpolation, that is, the actual frame rate is most likely 60 FPS or lower.
MediaTek talks about cooperation with game studios and reports support for MegaLights in Unreal Engine 5.6, Nanite in UE 5.5, as well as the Vulkan 1.4 API. Among the features of the latter: Host Image Copy technology, which transmits image data via the CPU instead of the GPU, which should reduce slowdowns when streaming textures and speed up the launch of games.
For those who consider a smartphone not only as a gaming device, the Dimensity 9500 may be of interest with other features. The chip supports 4K shooting at 120 frames per second with Dolby Vision, RAW file processing, working with 200-megapixel sensors, and portrait video in 4K at 60 FPS.
In addition, MediaTek has implemented support for new-level AI functions, including energy-efficient image generation and processing of large language models directly on the device.
Nevertheless, so far all MediaTek's statements remain at the marketing level. Independent performance and power consumption tests will show how much they correspond to reality. The first smartphones based on Dimensity 9500 are expected to go on sale in the fourth quarter of 2025.
