Blender on Nothing Phone - Render test

3DPrintedCat

Phones are powerful but why?

Ok hear me out. Pro gets thrown around in the phone industry but rarely points to anything but better cameras and a higher price.

But.. can phones do something really wild?

YES.

I am mostly known for concepts in the Nothing Community, but I’m actually more technical than that. I’m a software architect after 3+ years of being a Full Stack Developer. So what? Well, I get weird YouTube recommendations and I had one that mixed my technical background and my concepting hobby.

Blender on android.

For those of us that like watching LTT, blender is usually used as a benchmark for computers. Sadly for a while, we couldn’t use the same benchmarks for phones. I am not doing this, but you could, probably. I don’t have the patience for that. But I can switch the base cube scene to cycles and render. Let’s discuss the phones I tested and how long they took:

Results

Nothing Phone (3): 11s

Nothing Phone (3a) Pro: 28s

Nothing Phone (1): 26s

OnePlus Open: 17s

Please give all the props to this user on GitHub that made this port, I didn’t make this!

https://github.com/dshawshank/APP-android_arm64/releases/tag/v0.0.5

CMF1_hacker

Interesting, however, I’ve recently found in the newest update (25 AUG 2025) that the NP3 is being throttled due to excessive heat and that wasn’t the case before.

I run simulations, usually on HPCs, but I think you’d find that the NP3 would be slower with a longer BLENDER simulation.

Furthermore, I’d suggest that 11 second is way too short. I’d recommend something on the order of minutes.

More information is here from a recent post that I made:

Part 1: https://nothing.community/d/41975-np3-25-aug-2025-update-soc-throttling-has-been-enabled

Part 2: https://nothing.community/d/42069-np3-25-aug-2025-update-thermal-based-throttling-part-2

Let me know what you think about a longer simulation.

3DPrintedCat

CMF1_hacker I’d be open to additional tests for sure to give it a real stress test. Let me dig through my files and find something big.

CMF1_hacker

3DPrintedCat also, which firmware are you on? I found that the device would almost shut down due to temps until the very last update.

3DPrintedCat

CMF1_hacker

Metroid-V3.5-250829-1700

Also I’ve created a blend file for benchmarking.

It’s 100 samples instead of 4096 because the full amount quotes the complete time at over 7 hours (picked a good one) should contain everything. I’ll let the Phone 3 cool down before I run it over again for a fair fight.

Download blender from the GitHub link, download the CrystalTest.blend file, navigate to the file by file, open, up 2 levels to find the real downloads area and select the file. Then render dropdown, and render image. When completed it will display the time above the image.

Edit, Completed the test:

Got 10m 14s on my Crystal test.blend at the standard 100 samples.

Hot to the touch