If you're on the hunt for a new gaming smartphone in India, here's our comprehensive list of the top devices you can go for.
The iPhone 16 Pro Max (pictured) is one of the best smartphones for gaming purposes
Mobile gaming has grown by leaps and bounds since the emergence of battle royale games like Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) and Call of Duty Mobile in the last few years. While older phones were limited to the technological prowess of their time, the recent era of smartphones has led to them becoming a portable gaming platform on their own, almost as powerful as a dedicated gaming console but without the hassle accompanying it. However, the best gaming smartphones are not restricted to games solely built for their platform but also offer console-quality gaming, as evident by the recent introduction of Death Stranding, Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Resident Evil Village for the latest iPhone 16 Pro Max.
In a sea of smartphones out there, choosing the best one for you can become a time-consuming process. Notably, the best gaming smartphones offer more than top-notch on-paper specifications. They come with features dedicated to enhancing the overall experience, such as great haptics, dedicated performance modes, and snazzy yet thermal efficient designs.
To help you make that choice, we have curated a list of the top gaming phones in India, including the iPhone 16 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, Realme GT 7 Pro, and more, which can fulfill your every gaming need.
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is the top-of-the-line handset from Apple. While it is not exactly advertised as a gaming-centric device, its underlying specifications indicate it indeed can perform the role of your gaming companion too. The smartphone boasts a large 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It is powered by the A18 Pro chipset which is among the fastest on the market.
The iPhone 16 Pro Max also comes with a dedicated Game mode which is said to optimise the handset's performance for gaming. It supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing for delivering more realistic lighting and reflections in games. Through its App Store, the company offers several console-quality games on the handset, including Assassin's Creed Mirage, Death Stranding: Director's Cut, and Resident Evil Village.
Competing with the iPhone 16 Pro Max in terms of not only being the best smartphone in the market but the best one for gaming too is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. The smartphone is powered by a custom Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset with a 4.47GHz peak clock speed and 12GB of RAM. The chip brings support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Vulkan optimisation for realistic graphics.
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S25 Ultra with a 6.9-inch Super AMOLED 2X screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The phone also comes with a Game Booster mode along with a high performance mode option. Users can also customise the optimisation level for each individual, tweaking settings like fps, screen resolution, and frame booster settings.
iQOO 13 is one of the few flagship handsets in the market which are built primarily for gamers. It comes with a 6.82-inch 8T LTPO AMOLED panel with a 144Hz refresh rate, a 2K resolution, and a 300Hz touch sampling rate. It can run any game you throw at it at the highest possible graphics settings, courtesy of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM, and Adreno 830 GPU.
iQOO has equipped the smartphone with a proprietary Q2 supercomputing chip that is said to improve gaming performance while being efficient. It also features a 7,000 mm square Vapor Chamber, which is what helps keep the heat under control.
The OnePlus 13 is yet another handset powered by Qualcomm's top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC. While this is not an out-and-out gaming-centric offering, OnePlus has equipped the handset with LPDDR5x RAM, UFS 4.0 storage, and an Adreno 830 GPU which handles graphic-intensive tasks. It sports a 6.82-inch Quad HD+ LTPO AMOLED screen with a 120Hz variable refresh rate.
The handset also comes with a second-generation Cryo-Velocity Cooling System along with a dual-layer Super Graphite vapour chamber for efficient heat dissipation. And if heating still becomes an issue during gaming, the company sells Freezing Point Phone Cooler as a separate accessory which directly clips to its back panel.
Realme GT 7 Pro is a flagship-grade offering from the China-based OEM. It sports a 6.78-inch 8T LTPO AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. The handset is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset with 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM. While its specifications remain at par with other top-level gaming handsets in the market, Realme claims it has used AI to improve both gaming performance and quality on the GT 7 Pro.
It comes with an AI Gaming Super Resolution feature which can bump up the resolution of a game from the usual 720p to up to 1.5K. However, this feature is currently supported for select games such as Free Fire, BGMI and Honor of Kings (HOK). There's another gaming-centric feature called AI Gaming Super Frame which simply cranks up the frames per second (fps) count.
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