It has been over a week since Hoyoverse launched its follow-up to Genshin Impact with Honkai: Star Rail. It has been a phenomenal hit, achieving 20 million downloads in a single day—outperforming what Genshin Impact achieved back in 2020. Like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail is a game that can be played on PC and mobile—and it makes us wonder what kind of phone will you need to play this hot new turn-based RPG.
Genshin Impact proved to us several times that you need an upper mid-range processor—the likes of a Snapdragon 778G or Dimensity 1080–to enjoy the game with all its beautiful graphics and stable gameplay. While we initially assumed on our quick review that Honkai: Star Rail is not as demanding as Genshin Impact because of its turn-based combat system, that happens to be NOT the case. In fact, Honkai: Star Rail is MORE demanding than Genshin Impact.
To confirm this, we tested three different processors and record their performance using Gamebench. For this test, we have the Exynos 1380 of the Galaxy A54, the Dimensity 7200 of the vivo V27 5G, and the Dimensity 8100 of the OPPO Reno8 Pro. We’ve tested all three processors with Genshin Impact, and they are capable of running the game at very high graphics with 60FPS enabled at over 70% stability—which means the gameplay experience is generally good.
How did these three phones fare in running Honkai: Star Rail? Here are our findings:
Exynos 1380: More stable, but forget going beyond 30FPS
You can hate the Exynos 1380 all you want, but we proved that it’s not as bad as you think. It’s a big, BIG improvement over the Exynos 1280, and we enjoyed playing Genshin Impact with it. With Honkai: Star Rail, it seems that Samsung has decided to limit FPS to 30 despite enabling 60FPS. We were getting an average of 24FPS with a respectable 85% stability, and the phone did not warm quickly despite playing the game for more than 10 minutes.
24FPS is the bare minimum to enjoy mobile games, and while the Galaxy A54 does not allow to go beyond 30FPS for now (until Samsung rolls out an update, that is), the 85% stability means that you can comfortably play Honkai: Star Rail on it at Very High graphics without worrying too much about frame drops.
Dimensity 7200: Can inch past 30FPS, but with frame drops
With the V27 5G, the game manages to run with an average of 34FPS at Very High graphics, but its 66% stability meant that frame drops were noticeable. Unlike the Galaxy A54, the V27 5G did get slightly warm after over 10 minutes of gameplay, but the phone was still comfortable to use.
The occasional frame drops may annoy you, but our experience on the V27 5G shows that this only occurs when you are exploring the game’s map. We did not notice any frame drops during the actual battle scenes, so the game is fairly playable at Very High graphics—even if it barely goes above 30FPS.
Dimensity 8100: Can push as high as 40FPS BUT throttling occurs
The Dimensity 8100 is more powerful than the Dimensity 7200, though it is based on an older 5nm process (the Dimensity 7200 uses a 4nm process). That being said, while we managed to do 40FPS on average, its unusually low 34% stability is due to the phone throttling the game down to as low as 11FPS to manage thermals properly.
Yes, the Reno8 Pro did get warm—slightly warmer than what we experienced on the V27 5G—and that explains why there was throttling involved. If you want to not worry about throttling, Honkai: Star Rail ran better on the Dimensity 8100 when we lowered the graphics to High—in this setting, the Reno8 Pro was less warm compared to when we were running the game at Very High.
Conclusion: You really NEED a POWERFUL phone to enjoy Honkai: Star Rail on mobile
Hoyoverse was not kidding when they said that you will need AT least a Snapdragon 855 processor to enjoy Honkai: Star Rail with its beautiful graphics and animations. Despite these upper mid-range processors being able to run Genshin Impact comfortably at Very High graphics, the same cannot be said with Honkai: Star Rail. Our tests show that Honkai Star Rail is more demanding than its sister game despite having a smaller game file size—it’s around 8GB when installed vs 22GB with Genshin Impact.
Should you WANT to play Honkai: Star Rail on a lower-end (ie. Snapdragon 695, Dimensity 810) or an older flagship device (ie. Snapdragon 888), you will most likely need to dial down graphics settings to Low and keep FPS to just 30 to run the game comfortably.
Things MAY change, however: this is the first official version of Honkai: Star Railand Hoyoverse is working on making the game more optimized with future builds. So there’s a chance that the results we got right now might improve on future versions of Honkai: Star Rail–for the meantime, you’ll need to really manage your expectations if you plan to play the game on your phone.
