Let’s take a look at the Nova 5T’s gaming performance
Any way you slice it, Huawei’s Nova 5T is a great phone for the price. Armed with a great set of cameras, pretty exterior and flagship internals, it’s an excellent all-around phone for not much money.
Aside from taking great photos and looking great in your pocket, it seems like the Nova 5T has another trick up its sleeve: from our time with it, Huawei’s newest mid-ranger is also a great gaming smartphone, thanks to its flagship pedigree. Just how great of a gaming smartphone is it? Well, let’s take a look at the numbers:
While Huawei’s new Kirin 990 is set to take over flagship duties in the company’s next flagship phone, the 7nm Kirin 980 is still a potent processor that’s more than enough for a majority of the population.
Looking at the benchmark results from AnTuTu, the processor (when set in performance mode) easily sails past the 300K point mark.
But gaming isn’t about benchmarks – it’s about games, so we took three graphically demanding games – Asphalt 9, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and PUBG Mobile – and measured their performance with the Nova 5T using GameBench, a tool that not only measures a game’s overall frame rates, but its stability and consistency as well.
For Asphalt 9 Legends, the Nova 5T recorded a median FPS of 30, with the graphics set on the highest possible setting. More importantly, the FPS stability for the said game was 93%, with Game Bench recording FPS variability of ±1.61 FPS while playing.
The results are even better for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which returned a median FPS of 60 FPS. FPS stability was even higher with this game, coming in at 97%, which means that the most FPS drops you’ll get, on average, is ±1.08 FPS.
Our third and final game is PUBG Mobile. We ran the game at the high and HD setting, and we managed to get 30 FPS with a perfect 100% stability, along with a ±0.4 FPS variability.
The Nova 5T’s 8GB of RAM also helps quite a bit when it comes to multitasking (as you never know when real life will intrude when you’re playing a game), ensuring that you won’t have performance issues when you’re switching to apps like Facebook in between rounds.
The Nova 5T’s large 128GB storage make it ideal for storing large game files, with enough room for the rest of your stuff like photos, music, and videos.
Probably the only weak point of the Nova 5T for gaming is the 3750mAh battery, which is 250mAh short of 4000mAh benchmark that most people look for today. But that’s easily addressed by the 22.5W Huawei SuperCharge tech in the phone. Even better – Huawei throws in a SuperCharger cable and charger with every purchase, which isn’t always the case with other phones in the same category that has fast charging tech built-in.
At just Php 18,990, the Nova 5T’s flagship hardware makes it a great choice for people looking to game on the go for not much money. And don’t forget that the Nova 5T isn’t just a gaming phone – it’s also a very capable smartphone on its own, as well as a photography powerhouse.
Huawei Nova 5T specs
- Kirin 980 processor
- Mali-G76 MP10 GPU
- 8GB of RAM
- 6.26-inch Full HD+ display with punch-hole notch, 1080 x 2340 resolution display
- 128GB of storage
- Dual SIM
- 3G, LTE
- Quadruple rear cameras: 48-megapixel f/1.8 Sony IMX586 main camera with OIS; 16-megapixel f/2.2 wide-angle camera; 2-megapixel f/2.4 macro lens; 2-megapixel depth camera; PDAF, LED Flash, AI scene detection
- 32-megapixel f/2.0 front camera
- WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, A-GPS
- Side-mounted fingerprint scanner, Face unlock, GPU Turbo 2.0, USB-C
- 3750mAh battery with 22.5w SuperCharge
- Android 9 Pie with EMUI 9.1
