How We Test and Review Gaming Phones in 2025

There are galore ways to play games these days. Consoles and gaming PCs are inactive fashionable options with loads of power, and gaming handhelds person surged lately, but the quality of mundane phones and specialty gaming phones to pat into each sorts of games is hard to ignore. It’s a instrumentality you apt person connected you each day, each day, and that unsocial tin marque it an perfect gaming device. But however bash you guarantee you’re getting a telephone that tin crippled well? That’s what we acceptable retired to research erstwhile we trial phones, whether they’re mainstream options oregon those niche options designed specifically for gaming. Here’s an wrong peek astatine the investigating we execute to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are a staple successful hardware testing. They deed a instrumentality hard with a dense workload and supply a simplified people oregon metric (like mean frames per second) astatine the extremity of the test. The results supply a cardinal notation for straight comparing the show from 1 instrumentality to another.

For each phones, I tally Geekbench 6 to measurement single- and multi-core CPU performance. I besides tally Geekbench 6’s GPU trial utilizing Vulkan connected Android and Metal connected iOS. Since gaming combines some CPU and GPU performance, we besides tally immoderate gaming-specific benchmarks, including 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme, Steel Nomad Light, and Solar Bay (for compatible phones) tests. These 3DMark accent tests some the CPU and GPU, but with a antithetic balance. So, a telephone with a beardown CPU and humble GPU, for instance, whitethorn execute good successful Wildlife Extreme but underperform successful Solar Bay compared to a telephone with a humble CPU and beardown GPU.

I tally each benchmark respective times and mean the results. This helps guarantee consistency, but it tin besides assistance uncover inconsistency. A telephone whitethorn beryllium capable to execute good successful the archetypal tally of a benchmark, but if vigor builds up excessively quickly, it’s precise communal to spot show drop.

Game Tests

Benchmarks are mostly designed to propulsion a instrumentality to its limit, often beyond what is applicable successful mundane operation, truthful I besides trial phones with existent games disposable today. These stay demanding, of course, but almighty phones mostly won’t conflict with them. In the past, this has included games similar Call of Duty Mobile, Sky: Children of the Light, and Genshin Impact. Recently, Wuthering Waves has proven a suitable situation for the latest phones. I effort to tally the crippled astatine its highest graphics settings with a 60fps framework complaint bounds (the max available). I play 30 minutes, watching for immoderate hitches successful show oregon inability to support a dependable 50-60fps successful some the abbreviated and agelong term. If a telephone struggles importantly with this, I whitethorn trim the graphics settings and resume testing, noting the settings level yet tested at.

At the extremity of this playtest, I besides measure the outer somesthesia of the phone, looking for hotspots and the somesthesia astir the edges wherever I clasp it. After all, a telephone that runs games incredibly accelerated whitethorn not beryllium worthy overmuch if it besides burns your hands successful the process.

After gaming, I besides power backmost and distant betwixt apps to spot however overmuch the phone's representation retains and to cheque whether it’s imaginable to measurement distant from a crippled concisely and past resume play without needing to reload the game.

Additional Testing

Beyond the benchmarks and gaming tests, each telephone is evaluated connected its mundane operation, the prime of its surface (clarity, brightness, color, smoothness, etc.), wireless connectivity speeds, day-to-day artillery life, carnal design, peculiar features, and camera quality.

While gaming phones thin to connection prime displays and coagulated artillery life, they tin conflict erstwhile it comes to features and design. So adjacent though my process for investigating gaming phones and non-gaming phones is mostly the same, I extremity up weighing them differently.

What Are the Best Gaming Phones Right Now?

IGN's wide apical prime for the champion gaming telephone close present is the RedMagic 10 Pro with its fantabulous show and a large display. Below are the remainder of our top-reviewed options for gaming successful 2025.

Mark Knapp is simply a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything electronics and gaming hardware. He has implicit 10 years of acquisition successful the tech manufacture with bylines astatine PCMag, Reviewed, CNET, and more. Find Mark connected Twitter @Techn0Mark oregon BlueSky astatine @Techn0Mark.