Honor 8 Pro Gaming Review: Smooth As Silk, Fast Like Lightning!

Injustice 2

The Honor 8 Pro from Huawei is making waves in the Indian market after it was launched for all the right reasons. The phone has a display that is right for gaming and VR. There is ample storage and RAM to ensure that it does not lag when you need it to take load. So I thought it’s time to try some gaming with it and see how it does.

Honor 8 Pro Hero Image

The Honor 8 Pro is many things in a phone. Two of the key features that make the phone stand out are the brilliant 2k QHD display and the sturdy 4000 mAH battery that powers this multi-purpose powerhouse. This combination makes the phone ideal for gaming. Both casual and a tad bit more serious gamers will find this phone very good. So I started checking it out as a gaming companion. But I wanted to check it out as close to real life usage as possible to get a full picture.

So here is what I did. I first configured the phone to have exactly all the apps and settings that my primary device has. That is roughly 67 apps and tons of videos and pictures. I then went on and loaded some games that were in increasing order of heaviness when it comes to testing the wherewithal of the phone.

A quick recap about the Honor 8 Pro. Running on the latest 16NM Kirin 960 octa-core processor with 6GB RAM backed by 128GB ROM (that can be further expanded via micro SD card to 256GB), it tackles the issue of fragmentation and lag that has long beset Android devices. The Honor 8 Pro is improving the gadget’s CPU single-core and multi-core performance by 10% and 18% respectively, making it faster to open applications. The GPU performance is increased by 180%. The Kirin 960 chipset features eight processor cores – four high-performance Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four low-power Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz – that improve single-core and multi-core performance by 10% and 18% respectively. The Mali-G71 includes support for the cutting-edge Vulkan graphics, computes API (application programming interface) and boosts graphic performance up to 400%. Honor 8 Pro will run the most demanding games at high frame rates with minimum lag and dropped frames, even in 3D.

I threw a ton of graphic heavy and resource intensive apps and games at it in parallel and there was hardly any sign of a stutter. In fact it felt a bit like the phone was eating it all up and asking for more with a wide smirk. Absolutely smooth as a hot knife running through butter. No heating, no frame drops, no stutter, no buffering, no lagging. In my books, there are very very few phones that can do this with so much ease. So the performance is absolutely top-class and flagship level. Multi-tasking and video loops were a breeze too.

Mortal Kombat

Let us now get into the gaming review in particular. I started with Mortal Kombat and wanted to move slowly up the hierarchy of heavy games. While Mortal Kombat was running, I had a whole bunch of other apps and even games like Injustice 2 running in parallel. I also had a heavy download running at the same time. Despite all this, the game came up in a jiffy and there was not even a hint of lag or frame drop. The graphics were perfect and smooth. Game playing was a breeze. It almost felt like the phone was laughing at me and asking me to give it more load. I went from level to level and revved up the graphics also, still smooth as butter. There was a slight sensation of heat on the top of the rear side, just a hint and not very considerable. I measured the temperature near the fingerprint scanner around the dual camera and it read 39.5 degree Celsius. That is very reasonable and not hot at all in comparison to other contemporary devices that heat up a lot

Injustice 2

I then moved to the current hot favorite – Injustice 2 next. The game is a very heavy download and the phone handled the download very well when the it was on the Jio 4G network. The set up was a breeze and then I got into game play. The pre-game video into was a joy to watch on the 2k QHD screen. Then I got into the game and role play was a breeze. The graphics were completely lag-free and there was absolutely no frame drop or stutter visible. What was very surprising was the fact that there wasn’t any notable heating when I played for an extended time. After an hour the device was slightly warm. I checked the temperature and it was 41 degrees Celsius. Again that is not a temperature that anyone would complain about given how much other devices heat up under similar gaming load

So all in all if you ask me to give a single line verdict on the gaming experience on the Honor 8 Pro, I would say that it is smooth as silk and fast like lightning! Given the price of Rs 29,999/- this is a nearly perfect gaming device. I have stopped using my PSP for the time being! That’s saying a lot given that I am a game addict.

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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