Poco F1 gets Mi 9’s Game Turbo mode and Game Toolbox 2.0 in latest beta update

Kingshuk De
March 22, 2019
Android, New features, News, Poco, Xiaomi
0
Poco F1 gets Mi 9’s Game Turbo mode and Game Toolbox 2.0 in latest beta update

NOTICE: We’ve created an archive of all major developments related to the Pocophone F1 smartphone. We are continuously updating that page with latest Poco F1 news so that you don’t need to search for information related to the device on daily basis. Head here to access that page.

Smartphone gaming is the next big thing nowadays. Game publishers are continuously porting popular titles from the consoles and PC to the mobile platforms, thanks to the increasing capabilities of the CPU and GPU,

Cross platform multiplayer is another key factor that attracts majority of mobile gamers. Smartphone makers spotted the opportunity to bring ‘gaming’ phones to the masses. Looking at the sales figures, it seems that those RGB laden cyberpunk themed phones are performing pretty well.

Black Shark was created out of Xiaomi as an independent subsidiary to produce gaming phones. Xiaomi, on the other hand, incorporated a couple of handy features for gamers in their in-house Android skin aka MIUI.

With the launch of Mi 9, Xiaomi introduced a dedicated ‘Game Turbo’ mode. According to the official description, the mode “predicts gaming scenes and intelligently allocates resources for complicated scenes”.

Sounds like a fancy shader pre-caching mechanism, isn’t it? They probably mix it with some CPU frequency tweaks so that a short phase of burst  provides better gaming performance.

The Chinese OEM also shipped a dedicated in-game toolbox that lets you see stats like CPU/GPU utilization and FPS counts. Moreover, there are options to adjust touch sensitivity.

miui_game_toolbox

Xiaomi progressed one step further, and planned to backport these features to their one year older flagship – the Mi 8 Series. The news came from Li Weixing, the General manager of Xiaomi’s Internet division.

mi_9_features_backport_weibo

Translated using Google Translate

The internal plan, shared by Li, featured a number of smartphones besides Mi 8 lineup to receive the Game Turbo feature in subsequent months. Surprisingly Poco F1 (also known as Pocophone F1) was not present in the list.

mi_9_features_older_phones

Click/Tap to zoom

Some Poco users reached out to Alvin Tse for his comments. Alvin, the head of Pocophone Global, did not give any ETA.

Believe it or not, MIUI developers secretly integrated those features in the closed beta builds for Poco F1. When it became a not-so-secret news, Alvin embraced the company’s responsibility.

The latest global beta, i.e. MIUI 9.3.21 for Pocophone F1 has brought the Game Turbo mode as well as the Game Toolbox 2.0.

The beta is currently rolling to a handful of users, but thanks to Xiaomi Firmware Updater project, we can share the direct link of the OTA update zip.

  • Device: Poco F1 / Pocophone F1
  • Codename: beryllium
  • Channel: Global (India) Beta
  • Version: 9.3.21
  • Android: 9.0
    • Type: Recovery
      • Download: Link
      • MD5: eb8cb2202a204a6e2046937127568a45

The OTA changelog, however, does not say anything about the new features. Guess Xiaomi needs to hire a bunch of new copywriters. 😅

poco_f1_9.3.21_ota

Have you got the beta update on your Poco? Let us know by commenting below.

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Kingshuk De

Kingshuk De

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.