vivo X90 Pro review

Funtouch 13 on top of Android 13

The vivo X90 Pro boots Android 13 with a proprietary layer on top, which varies depending on where you are in the world. The China-bound version is called Origin OS 3, while we get the 'international' Funtouch OS - v13, to be specific.

The vivo X80 Pro used Funtouch v12, and this new iteration isn't at all different in look and feel. And it's a pretty customized and customizable experience.

Lockscreen • Homescreen • Homescreen • Folder view • Settings menu

One of the useful proprietary features can be found in the recent apps menu. You can choose between the standard carousel formation and a horizontal tiles layout - sort of like MIUI, only scrollable horizontally. The setting is available right then and there - you don't need to look for it in the menus.

Recent apps • Recent apps • Pop-up • Spilt screen

The notification shade is pretty familiar, and Funtouch is staying away from Google's large bubble-style quick toggles - it's simple circular buttons here. The default accent color here is blue and can be controlled via the Android 13 AOSP color palette interface. A powerful theming engine is still present.

The app drawer has an expandable recommended apps category on the top (most commonly used ones), whereas using the vertical scroller on the right would highlight the apps beginning with the selected letter.

Notification shade • Quick toggles • App drawer • Widgets next to the app drawer

The rest of the UI has plenty of non-stock bits. In the Dynamic effects sub-menu, vivo has grouped a bunch of customization options for the home screen, lock screen and animation effects. There are even various charging and facial recognition animations.

Dynamic effects

The always-on display settings are in a different sub-menu, but the phone still gives you plenty of options to tinker with - a wide selection of animations, clock styles, colors, backgrounds.

Always-on display

The Sound menu holds a few pleasant surprises. Just like Samsung and its OneUI, Funtouch takes care of people with hearing problems, and you can calibrate the sound to be heard by elderly people or those with impaired hearing. Additionally, notifications and calls get separate volume sliders. The vibration intensity can be adjusted for calls and notifications independently. No system-wide equalizer is available for the loudspeaker, though, which could be either a negative or a positive, depending on how you look at it. An Audio Super Resolution toggle is thrown into the mix.

Sound options

The Smart motion menu holds a handful of familiar screen-on and screen-off gestures along with some new additions. One of those requires you to wave in front of the screen during an incoming call to answer hands-free - useful if you're cooking, for example.

Smart motion menu

Holding the volume down key can be used to launch an app or do a certain task, although the list is limited to the camera app, turning on/off the torch, start recording audio, open Facebook, or open any custom app. The so-called Quick action feature doesn't work when playing music for obvious reasons. Why isn't there a double-press option for Quick action, though?

Shortcuts and accessibility • Quick action • S-capture • Screen-split • Easy Touch

A dedicated Ultra Game Mode is available, and it has it all. Most of the features are about mitigating disturbance during gameplay or preventing certain apps from displaying notifications. One of the most intriguing features that have been around on vivo phones for a while is the ability to turn off the screen and keep the game running in the background. Especially useful for turn-based games or those requiring some sort of "farming" or "grinding".

Ultra Game mode

Having all of these customizable gestures, actions and additional features around is cool, but we can't help but wish that Funtouch would have done a better job of organizing them - and that's been a recurring complaint. As things currently stand, it is hard to find certain options, even when you know for a fact that they exist and consequently, discovering new things is even harder.

The Funtouch launcher also offers its own gallery, audio and video players, system manager, and Smart Remote (for the IR blaster). There is also a dedicated Themes app.

Albums • Video • Music • Smart Remote • Themes

Performance and benchmarks

The vivo X90 Pro is the first smartphone with top-of-the-line Dimensity 9200 chipset to visit our office. It is fabbed on the 2nd generation TSMC 4nm process (N4P) and brings plenty of improvements.

The Dimensity 9200 chipset features an octa-core processor with a prime Cortex-X3 core @ 3.05Hz, 3x Cortex-A715 cores @ 2.85GHz and 4x Cortex-A510 @ 1.85GHz. For a comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 had 4x Cortex-A715 and 3x Cortex-A510 in addition to its 1x Cortex-X3.

The SoC utilizes the ARM Immortalis-G715 MC11 GPU with hardware-based ray tracing engine. The new flagship graphics unit brings Variable Rate Shading (VRS), double machine learning performance compared to the predecessor and ARM Fixed Rate Compression (AFRC) for reduced bandwidth usage.

MediaTek is also bringing a sixth-generation AI Processing Unit - the APU 690, which brings a 35% improvement over its predecessor in the ETHZ5.0 benchmark app. The chipset also enables support for speedy LPDDR5X RAM with support for up to 8,533Mbps memory and UFS 4.0 storage for blazing-fast data transmission and direct storage access to the CPU cores.

The Dimensity 9200 chip inside the vivo X90 Pro contains a new custom ISP - vivo V2. This third-gen chip (following the V1 and V1+) comes with unparalleled computing power capacity, power density, and data density, vivo claims. There is also a dedicated SRAM (Static RAM) cache unit that can reduce maximum power consumption by over 99% and the power efficiency ratio to 200%, compared to classic DDRs with external memory design.

The imaging chip of vivo was always about quick capture of photos in low lighting, and the ultra-clear image quality engine now has a special algorithm called Ultra Zoom EIS, combining IMU, OIS, and EIS for better zooming without losing the quality of the image.

The vivo V2 also supports "zero-latency" snapping which, in theory, should work through motion detection to take a picture of the moment you hit the shutter button. There is also RawEnhance 2.0, which builds upon the first version of the image-stacking feature that produces HQ photos in low light.

The vivo X90 Pro we have for this review packs 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.0 storage. A 512GB model is also available for purchase in some markets.

And now, let's run some benchmarks.

Starting off with Geekbench 5 CPU test - the X90 Pro posted an excellent multi-core score, a notable improvement over the Dimensity 9000 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has five high-performance CPU cores instead of four (counting the X3), and that's why it is currently the best-scoring processor.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  4927
• OnePlus 11
  4899
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  4300
• vivo X90 Pro
  4273
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  3984
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  3839
• ROG Phone 6D
  3531
• vivo X80 Pro
  3505
• vivo X70 Pro+
  3469
• vivo X70 Pro
  2956

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also relies on the same Cortex-X3 prime core, but it has a higher clock than the Dimensity 9200's and hence the higher score in the single-core test, too.

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  1537
• vivo X90 Pro
  1387
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  1324
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  1277
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  1248
• vivo X80 Pro
  1184
• OnePlus 11
  1150
• vivo X70 Pro+
  1106
• ROG Phone 6D
  1015
• vivo X70 Pro
  875

The ARM Immortalis-G715 MC11 GPU offers outstanding performance across the board, and it is bested only by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Adreno 740 GPU, though not by much. It is a significant improvement over the 2022's mobile GPUs.

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  61
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  59
• vivo X90 Pro
  55
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  46
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  45
• ROG Phone 6D
  43
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  42
• vivo X80 Pro
  41
• vivo X70 Pro+
  27
• vivo X70 Pro
  21

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  69
• OnePlus 11
  68
• vivo X90 Pro
  54
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  51
• ROG Phone 6D
  46
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  44
• vivo X80 Pro
  37
• vivo X70 Pro+
  29
• vivo X70 Pro
  20

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (1080p)
  110
• vivo X90 Pro (1080p)
  93
• vivo X90 Pro
  74
• ROG Phone 6D
  71
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  71
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  68
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  67
• OnePlus 11
  57
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• vivo X80 Pro
  44
• vivo X70 Pro
  40
• vivo X70 Pro+
  33

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• ROG Phone 6D
  122
• vivo X90 Pro (1080p)
  120
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (1080p)
  120
• vivo X90 Pro
  118
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  115
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  113
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  112
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  91
• vivo X80 Pro
  82
• vivo X70 Pro
  77
• OnePlus 11
  60
• vivo X70 Pro+
  58

3DMark Wild Life Extreme (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  3790
• vivo X90 Pro
  3698
• OnePlus 11
  3594
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  2753
• ROG Phone 6D
  2555
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  2393

Moving on to the compound AnTuTu 9 test we can see that the Dimensity 9200 is holding its own against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phones with an impressive score.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
  1241531
• vivo X90 Pro
  1228735
• OnePlus 11
  1140661
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  1039412
• vivo X80 Pro
  1002570
• Huawei Mate 50 Pro
  979921
• Tecno Phantom X2 Pro
  961576
• ROG Phone 6D
  948594
• vivo X70 Pro+
  837833
• vivo X70 Pro
  694499

In summary, the Dimensity 9200 is a true flagship chipset and a worthy rival to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Our benchmarks show it's roughly 30% faster in the CPU benchmarks compared to the outgoing Dimensity 9000+ and 20% faster in the GPU department. It is also about 20% more powerful than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip in CPU and GPU tests.

The vivo X90 Pro features a massive heatsink-based cooling system, one of the largest passive solutions around. Naturally, we ran some stability tests, and the results are okay, though far from ideal.

The Dimensity 9200 coupled with vivo's cooling system provides excellent CPU stability - about 75%. The phone got a bit warm after an hour of running at peak load, but far from hot.

Then we ran the 3D Mark stress test - 20 loops of 1 minute GPU-intensive test. The vivo X90 Pro ran rather well for 10 minutes, but then dropped its performance down to 62%. Which is still a good score, considering we've seen flagships that do 40% or less. That is the good news.

CPU test • GPU test

The bad news is that after 20 mins of GPU stress test, the vivo X90 Pro became unbelievably hot - enough to burn your hands. The frame was untouchable across the entire phone, the screen was crazy hot, while the back only remained warm.

We tested the vivo X90 Pro across various games, and it never became as hot as on the 3D Mark stress test, which is great.