[Updated] I originally reported that the G85 was identical to the G80. This was wrong. The G85 has a slightly tweaked GPU going up to 1000MHz (a 50MHz increase).

Mediatek has launched yet another chipset which will feature in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. It is starting to feel like they just come up with a new chipset for every new Xiaomi launch rehashing their older chipsets.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with the performance of the MediaTek Helio G80, while I appreciate it is aimed at the affordable segment of the market, in reality, the price of phones featuring this is not far of phones with the superb MediaTek Helio G90T.

So is the Helio G80 another flop or will it impress like the G90T?

CPU

The new chipset is an Octa-Core SoC built on TSMc 12nm FinFET Process like all the other Helio G chipsets.

There are then two Arm Cortex A75 cores clocked at 2.0GHz, and 6 Arm Cortex A55 efficiency cores clocked at 1.8GHz.

That sounds similar.

That’s because the Helio G80 features the exact same specification with the exact same frequencies.

Even the G70 isn’t much different which has the 6x Cortex-A55 cores run just .1Ghz lower at 1.7GHz.

In comparison, the Helio G90T which is used on the Redmi Note 8 Pro and Realme 6 has 2×2.05 GHz Cortex-A76 and then 6x Cortex-A55 running at 2.0 GHz.

GPU

So the CPU is going to perform just the same as the G80. What about the GPU?

Well, the G85 has an Arm Mali-G52 MC2 running at 950MHz 1000MHz which also looks pretty similar. Oh wait, that’s because the G80 has a Mali-G52 GPU but running at 950MHz, so you get a 5.2% bump in frequency with just 50Mhz.

And you guessed it, the G70 isn’t much different, also with an Arm Mali-G52 MC2 running at 820MHz. At least the difference between the G70 to G80 is 130MHz which represents just shy of a 16% improvement.

Again, the G90T is completely different with a well-specced Mali-G76 MC4 GPU that has consistently outperformed the Qualcomm chipsets at similar price points.

Benchmarks – Antutu – 3D Mark – Geekbench

The Redmi Note 9 has only just been launched so the only benchmark we know of is the Antutu listing Xiaomi/Redmi posted.

They claim 205,946, which seems accurate as I managed 201,299 on the Realme 6 which represents a 2% difference.

In comparison, the Helio G90T scores 41% higher with 290,644 when I tested it on the Realme 6

I have not tested the Helio G70, which is used on the Realme C3 is reported to score 193,000 points.

We have no other benchmarks, but given that the Helio G80 and Helio G85 are almost identical we can assume the other benchmarks will be similar. The new Helio G85 is aimed at “everyday gamers”, whatever that means. However, the Helio G80 didn’t do amazingly well on the 3D mark results:

The CPU spec is identical to the G80 so we can assume the Geekebench results will be identical. There maybe some variance because I tested the Realme 6i rather than a Xiaomi phone but from my testing of different phones I managed:

Overall

Towards the end of last year, with the launch of the G90T, it looked like Mediatek were set to shake up the chipset market. Things looked even better with the launch of the Dimensity chipsets.

Since then, we have seen one phone use the Dimensity 1000L, no phones have been announced with the Dimensity 1000.

Only two phones to date use the Helio G90T, and Mediatek has been releasing new chipsets almost monthly with little difference between them.

The MediaTek Helio G85, by all accounts, is almost identical to the Helio G80 with a tiny 5% increase on the GPU frequencies. This feels more like a marketing stunt announcing a new phone with a brand new chipset, which is actually barely any different.