Android 17 is making $1,000 premium Pixel phones perform worse than some budget phones

There are plenty of benefits of owning a Pixel phone, but the ability to smoothly run high-end games on it is definitely not one of them. It's not that the Tensor chipset cannot handle any sort of gaming at all.

You can definitely play some basic games on phones like the Pixel 10 without experiencing any major hiccups. However, some Pixel phones are now even struggling to do that ever since installing the Android 17 update.

Pixels are struggling to run even casual games

I know, unlike iPhones or OnePlus, Pixels are not known for gaming. They can definitely run your favorite game, but there's a high possibility that the performance that you will get wouldn't be as impressive as on their competitors. That is usually the case with high-end titles; modern Google phones can easily run small and basic games at their highest settings without you experiencing any major stutter or frame drop.

However, many users are now reportedly experiencing performance issues even on less demanding games like Hill Climb Racing 2, Pokémon Champions, and Clash Royale after installing the Android 17 update on their Pixel phones. A slightly more resource-consuming game like Brawl Stars has become totally unplayable.

The problem doesn't appear to be exclusive to any particular Pixel model. I was able to spot complaints from users owning devices from the Pixel 8, the Pixel 9, as well as the latest Pixel 10 series. Even the $1,200 Pixel 10 Pro XL seems to be affected by this issue.

What exactly could be causing the problem

At the time of writing, Google hasn't acknowledged the issue, and we also don't have any clue as to what exactly could be causing it other than going with the usual explanation of it being caused by some sort of bug. It was earlier believed that the lag was only happening on the beta build of the latest Android update, but users are truly shocked to see that it's happening on the stable release as well.

Is there any fix available?

The answer here is both yes and no. You see, users have shared some working fixes, but a few other affected users claim that these fixes don't work for them. For instance, a Redditor mentions that games like Clash Royale and Brawl Stars start to run at normal FPS after downloading the latest Google Play Services update of June.

However, another user replies to this comment, stating that they continue to experience the lag on different games even after downloading the June Google Play Services update. Another solution that some users claim to work is to change the preferred GPU driver.

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