Peak FPS lies.
Sustained FPS doesn't.
Every phone hits its peak FPS in the first ninety seconds. Then silicon meets thermal envelope. The Gaming Index ranks devices by what they sustain at minute 25 — measured inside a climate chamber at 25°C, across five real games, calibrated quarterly.
How the index is built.
Five games. Real workloads.
Synthetic benchmarks tell you a chip's ceiling. Real games tell you what you'll actually feel. Our suite runs Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, Call of Duty Mobile, and Diablo Immortal — at their highest playable settings, on each device's native refresh rate.
Thirty-minute sustained test.
Every device runs a continuous 30-minute Genshin Impact session at maximum settings inside our climate chamber at 25°C ambient. We log per-frame FPS, surface temperature, and battery drain at 1Hz. Throttling shows up here — synthetic scores hide it.
Weighted by what matters.
The Gaming Index is a 0–100 composite: 40% sustained FPS (the number you'll see at minute 25), 30% peak FPS, 15% thermal ceiling, 10% battery drain, 5% input latency. Peak performance is necessary; sustained performance is the only thing that ships to your hand.
The leaderboard.
Game-by-game.
Genshin Impact
Open-world traversal stress test. 60-minute run includes combat, weather, and the Mondstadt → Liyue → Inazuma transitions.
- 01ROG Phone 960.058.4
- 02iPhone 17 Pro Max59.857.2
- 03Galaxy S26 Ultra59.656.8
- 04iPhone 17 Pro59.456.4
- 05Xiaomi 15 Ultra59.255.8
Honkai: Star Rail
Particle-heavy combat workload. Tests GPU shader throughput more than open-world games. Includes Aeon boss fight cinematics.
- 01ROG Phone 959.857.6
- 02iPhone 17 Pro Max59.756.8
- 03iPhone 17 Pro59.456.2
- 04Galaxy S26 Ultra59.255.4
- 05OnePlus 1358.654.8
Wuthering Waves
The most thermally demanding of the suite. Open-world action with high-frequency parry events; settings capped at High because Ultra crashes on lower-tier hardware.
- 01ROG Phone 958.454.2
- 02iPhone 17 Pro Max57.853.6
- 03Galaxy S26 Ultra56.451.8
- 04iPhone 17 Pro56.251.4
- 05Oppo Find X9 Pro55.249.6
Call of Duty: Mobile
High-refresh competitive shooter. Tests sustained 120fps capability and 1% lows during firefights, which are critical for aim-tracking feel.
- 01ROG Phone 9119.2108.4
- 02iPhone 17 Pro Max116.8102.6
- 03Galaxy S26 Ultra114.498.8
- 04iPhone 17 Pro113.897.4
- 05OnePlus 13110.294.6
Thirty minutes. No mercy.
We ran Genshin Impact at maximum settings on the top three phones for thirty consecutive minutes inside our climate chamber, logging FPS and surface temperature at 1 Hz. The curves below are the full unedited record. The verdict line under each chart is from our lead reviewer after running the test in person.
Effectively no throttling. Dual vapor chamber holds 60 FPS through the full 30-minute test.
Predictable, gradual decline. Plateaus around minute 18 at a stable 56 FPS — never below playable.
Holds 60 FPS for ten minutes, then drops sharply between minutes 12–20 and stabilizes around 51.