A video doing the rounds on X shows the £1,000 handset gasping its way through Genshin Impact with stuttering frames, flickering visuals and lag that would embarrass a five-year-old budget phone.

At the heart of this humiliation sits Google’s Tensor G5 chip, a slab of silicon made with TSMC that spends more time thinking than doing. It handles AI features and camera trickery beautifully, but when the phone is asked to deliver raw performance, it goes into meltdown.

The Pixel 10 Pro XL is fine for emails and selfies, but once a real game loads, it folds.

The Tensor G5 was supposed to fix Google’s long-standing performance problems, yet early testing shows it performing worse than the Tensor G4. That is an impressive achievement, just not the sort Google should boast about.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max and phones with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 both run Genshin Impact smoothly and maintain stable temperatures. Meanwhile, the Pixel 10 Pro XL wheezes, drops frames and occasionally stops responding altogether.

In the clip shared by Abhinov on X, the player can hardly move the character because the frame rate collapses into single digits. The display flickers so badly it looks like a hardware fault, but it is simply the G5 struggling to generate frames. Even pulling down the notification shade becomes a challenge, as the system interface stutters and skips like a scratched record.

This is nothing new for Google’s in-house chips. Every Tensor generation promises console-grade gaming and ends up offering frustration-grade performance. Google’s engineers have built a chip that excels at recognising cats, enhancing sunsets and translating menus in real time, but it still cannot run a demanding mobile game without self-destructing.

The Pixel 10 Pro XL proves once again that Google’s obsession with AI has come at the expense of computing power. For all the company’s talk about smart features and “context-aware intelligence,” the result is a flagship phone that turns into a pocket heater the moment you open a game.

The Tensor G5 is proof that prioritising intelligence over performance makes sense only if your idea of fun is watching frame rates die in real time. For gamers, the Pixel 10 Pro XL turns games into an expensive slideshow.