Moto G96 Performance
Motorola promises 1,600 nits of peak brightness, and the display does deliver when outdoors, even under direct sunlight. Colours are a bit saturated at the default, Vivid colour setting, so I had to tone them down to the Natural preset for more realistic reproduction.
The new Moto G96 switches gears to a more new-age 4nm processor. There’s the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2, that is also more efficient compared to the 6nm Snapdragon 6s Gen 3 used in the previous model. Motorola uses LPDDR4X RAM but sticks to the UFS 2.2 storage from the older model.
Weirdly, there are two PDF reader apps, six pre-installed games, and 11 third-party apps in total. Thankfully, you can uninstall every single one of these and be left behind with a bunch of Moto-branded apps that are quite useful. Moto AI is not included in the software package, but you do get access to Google’s Gemini. Perplexity AI also comes preinstalled; it isn’t as deeply integrated as Gemini for basic everyday queries.
| Benchmarks | Moto G96 | Samsung Galaxy M36 | Realme P3 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display resolution | FHD+ | FHD+ | 1.5K |
| Chipset | Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 (4nm) | Exynos 1380 (5 nm) | Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 (4nm) |
| AnTuTu v10 | 7,66,690 | 6,00,808 | 8,42,381 |
| PCMark Work 3.0 | 14,809 | 14,358 | 13,816 |
| Geekbench 6 Single | 1,008 | 1,015 | 1,185 |
| Geekbench 6 Multi | 2,907 | 2,976 | 3,209 |
| GFXB T-rex | 100 | 95 | 60 |
| GFXB Manhattan 3.1 | 45 | 43 | 39 |
| GFXB Car Chase | 23 | 23 | 21 |
| 3DM Slingshot Extreme OpenGL | 4,829 | 4,683 | 5,405 |
| 3DM Slingshot | 6,297 | 5,813 | 6,871 |
| 3DM Wild Life | 3,010 | 2,718 | 4,101 |
| 3DM Wild Life Unlimited | 3,065 | 2,676 | 4,183 |
As for raw performance, I was impressed by the stability the Moto G96 offers in PCMark’s Wild Life Stress and Wild Life Extreme Stress tests. While daily app multitasking was not a problem, gaming wasn’t either. Given its budget price, don’t expect it to run demanding games like Genshin Impact flawlessly, but you can play Call of Duty: Mobile at medium graphics settings without any hiccups. In short, its performance is suitable for mid-level gaming.
Selfies captured in daylight pack good detail. The dynamic range is under control, and therefore, the backgrounds are also properly exposed. However, edge detection, similar to the primary camera, is somewhat weak and struggles to produce accurate cutouts when used in conjunction with Portrait mode. In dimly lit settings, the selfie camera struggles to click a clear photo. These will come out quite blurry unless you have plenty of ambient light around you. (Tap image to expand)
While the primary camera manages better close-ups than the macro mode, it somehow struggled with focus when attempting to record subjects at around 20 centimetres away. 4K video captured at 30 fps offers the best overall quality with decent stabilisation, but appeared a bit contrasty. Details were also a bit soft. There’s a noticeable focus hopping in daylight when shooting at 1080p at 60 fps, which worsens in low light. Overall, frame rates weren’t steady, and noise is quite evident when recording low-light video.