The Google Pixel 5 is not the most powerful phone, but a new security update may have changed that. The updated Pixel appears to have significantly improved GPU performance. The update does not magically make the Pixel 5's Snapdragon 765G run as fast as the Snapdragon 888 or 865. But it does mean that the Pixel 5's performance is significantly better than it was when it first launched.

Many noticed that the Pixel 5 underperformed at launch compared to other phones with the Snapdragon 765G chip; in Geekbench testing, it scored 1,617 multicore points, well behind many 2020 releases. It was even lower than the 2,329 points earned by the Pixel 4.

After the update, however, things appear to have changed; Der Standard and Anandtech editors noticed a 30-50% improvement in performance after the latest Pixel security update.

According to Andreas Proschofsky of Der Standard, Pixel 5 recorded 2278/2260 in 3DMark's OpenGL/Vulkan test. After the update, these numbers rose to 3286/3083. This is a very significant change.

It is unclear why such a large change occurred after the security update; Proschofsky speculates that there may have been some performance throttling in Pixel 5, which is now turned off. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation of this, nor is it known why the phone's GPU performance has improved so dramatically.

The update changelog lists "performance optimization for certain graphics-intensive apps and games," but does not elaborate further.

The GPU boost is the most important part of the update, but it is not the only thing the patch provides: camera quality on the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G has been improved in "certain" unspecified apps. The patch also fixes an issue on all Pixel phones that previously caused the phone to freeze during startup, along with a glitch where the phone appeared to be offline while connected to a VPN.

But if you have a Pixel 5, be sure to update as soon as it rolls out to you. Better performance is always a good thing, especially when it's such a big improvement.