MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9600 Pro aims to make flagship phones even better gaming machines, with a big focus on graphics performance, ray tracing and running games at higher frame rates without using as much power.
The new flagship smartphone chip brings a redesigned CPU, GPU and NPU, with MediaTek claiming meaningful gains over the previous generation. The company says the Dimensity 9600 Pro can deliver up to 27% better performance in a 3DMark test, while using up to 24% less power at comparable performance.
Gaming is where those improvements get particularly interesting. MediaTek says the chip is capable of native 1080p gameplay at up to 85fps, while gaming power consumption can be up to 18% lower. That should make it better suited to longer gaming sessions without the usual trade-off between performance and battery life.
The 9600 Pro also introduces MediaTek’s first-generation Neural Graphics architecture, which brings AI processing into the GPU and coordinates it with the NPU. One of the more practical applications is game upscaling from native 540p to 1080p, potentially giving demanding games a sharper look without requiring the phone to render everything at full resolution.
Ray tracing is getting a boost, too. MediaTek has supported hardware ray tracing since the Dimensity 9200, but the 9600 Pro advances the ray-tracing pipeline with its latest OAM technology. The company expects its referenced Extreme ray-tracing result to improve by around 18% compared with the Dimensity 9500, bringing more detailed lighting and textures to supported games.
The CPU gets a new eight-core arrangement with two top cores, three big cores and three small cores, while the dual-NPU setup provides additional processing headroom. MediaTek claims the high-performance NPU can deliver twice the previous generation’s large-language-model performance, although the company’s broader AI capabilities are a separate part of the chip’s pitch.
MediaTek will offer the 9600 Pro alongside a standard Dimensity 9600. The Pro is positioned as the higher-performance option, while the regular 9600 is designed to bring the flagship experience to a wider range of phones.
For gamers, though, the headline is clear: the Dimensity 9600 Pro is pushing smartphone graphics towards higher frame rates, better ray tracing and more efficient performance.
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