At an exclusive OnePlus “Overpower” session for key opinion leaders and media at the Marina Bay Sands Expo in Singapore, BW Businessworld caught up with Marcel Campos, Director of Product Strategy at OnePlus India, as the company laid out its most aggressive gaming strategy yet. Built around a new architecture comprising OP Gaming Core, OP Performance Tri-Chip and OP FPS Max — all debuting on the upcoming OnePlus 15 Series — OnePlus is trying to turn its long-running “fast and smooth” promise into something measurable in frames per second, touch latency and network stability for hundreds of millions of mobile gamers. The Singapore showcase sits on top of the Gaming Technology platform announced out of Bengaluru on three November 2025.
In that conversation with BW Businessworld in Singapore, the man fronting this shift is Campos. Brazilian-born and now based in New York City, he is tall, strapping and visibly at home in a room full of gamers and journalists. A consummate gamer himself, he spent almost 15 years at Asus, rising to global head of marketing for the Taiwanese PC brand behind the Republic of Gamers line, before moving to OnePlus, where he is about to complete three years. He talks about silicon and latency with the slightly dangerous warmth of someone who once let a game take over his life.
That same energy infuses the company’s official line on the new push. “True gaming fun starts with flawlessly smooth gameplay, and that requires truly overpowered hardware,” he says in the launch note, sketching out the stakes in a single sentence. “We're delivering OverPower specs that eliminate stutters and lag. We handle the overwhelming performance, our users enjoy the uninterrupted joy of play,” he adds, turning a slogan into a promise.
Overpower, OP And The Language Of Gamers
Campos frames the naming of the platform not as a branding exercise, but as a nod to the way gamers already speak to each other, and he starts by unpacking the slang before he gets to the silicon. “Oh, well, if you play games, you probably already know. If you don't play games, let me introduce you. We know when you have those weapons that are super powerful in a game, or even a tool that can do it all,” he says, drawing directly from the rhythm of online matches. “So, inside the gaming community, we call it "overpowered," or OP. Okay, so that's why when you see the technologies that we announced, all of them are OP, which means "overpowered" in the gaming community. Okay? So it’s the OP gaming core, OP FPS Max, OP Tri-Chip. We have all those things together,” he explains.
He is amused that the acronym also mirrors the company’s initials, but he insists the origin runs from community to brand, not the other way around. “Yeah, I thought OP was for OnePlus, but it works in that sense as well,” he says, laughing at the coincidence. He then grounds it again in the way people actually type when they are mid-match. “That’s why we selected "Overpower," because OP is how gamers refer to it in their chats when they’re playing. They do not write "overpowered" because they play very fast, so they use OP, just like the acronym,” Campos adds. Underneath the playfulness is a simple point: OnePlus wants its gaming language to sound like the lobby, not the boardroom.
Three Pillars, One Narrative: Gaming
To explain why gaming has moved to the foreground, Campos reaches for the internal framework he says shapes every product. This, he stresses, is an evolution of that structure rather than a hard pivot away from other features. “I think doubling down is true, but that’s not all we are doing,” he says, before laying out the model. “For us, there are three pillars for our products, right? We have the camera, which is still a very important pillar for us, and we invest a lot in it. Um, people already know that we are talking about the T-Max for the next generation, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised by that. The second pillar is software plus AI. Yes, we have the Oxygen OS, which we just launched—the 16. It's an amazing OS with a lot of new features and is very stable. Yeah, and also AI. We have Plus Mind coming, which is amazing—software with AI that we are investing in; performance is the third pillar,” he explains. The imaging pipeline he refers to is internally branded as T-Max, part of that first pillar that OnePlus wants to keep strong even as it talks more loudly about gaming.
Within that third pillar, gaming becomes the story-telling device. Campos argues that the most brutal workload is also the clearest way to demonstrate what the hardware and software can actually do. “When it comes to performance, OnePlus has a legacy. We’ve always talked about being fast and smooth, and we believe there’s no better way to tell the story of performance than by focusing on gaming,” he says, explicitly tying years of positioning to a concrete use case. The decision is also rooted in what users are doing on their phones. “Not only from our perspective, but because the community told us. Our community started asking for more gaming-related features on the phone because they are playing a lot. Globally, there are more than 500 million people playing games on smartphones. It’s crazy, right?” he adds, pointing to the scale of the audience.
Much of what sits under the Overpower banner has been in the works quietly for a while. Campos is keen to underline the long development cycle behind the reveal. “We decided that now was the time to announce all those things we have been developing over the past three years,” he says, emphasising the gestation period. “Some of these features were not included in earlier phones, but now, with the new processor, the new GPU, and the new technologies, we have a new vapor chamber that is incredible. So, all those things together—yes, now we can do it. Now it's time to promote and talk more about it,” he explains. The message is that OnePlus is not just skinning Android differently; it is trying to rewrite how performance is delivered when a game is running.
OP Gaming Core: Rewriting The Game Loop
At the heart of that effort is OP Gaming Core, described by OnePlus as a self-developed, chip-level technology designed specifically for gaming scenarios. Rather than sit as a surface-level booster, it lives down at the foundational layer of Android, inside the relationship between CPU, GPU and the operating system.
According to the company, OP Gaming Core is backed by over 20,000 lines of original code operating at the foundational level of Android and supported by 254 gaming-optimisation patents. The ambition is to reconstruct how gaming performance is delivered “from the chip level upward” instead of simply pushing clocks higher and hoping that the battery and thermal envelope can cope.
Central to this re-architecture is the OnePlus CPU Scheduler. In place of the standard Completely Fair Scheduler used by most Android devices, OnePlus has built a self-developed chip energy consumption model tuned for gaming patterns. The scheduler, the company says, conducts systematic analysis of real gaming workloads, identifies the points that actually block critical tasks and reassigns computing resources so that non-essential work gets out of the way.
The outcome, on OnePlus’s own internal measurements, is up to a twenty-two point seven four percent reduction in CPU instructions for key gaming tasks. That abstract number translates into a processor that wastes less effort on work players never see, which in turn can cut power draw and heat build-up during long sessions. By operating “at the most fundamental chip level”, as OnePlus puts it in its technical description, the scheduler is meant to eliminate the hidden delays and resource clashes that cause sudden stutters even on powerful hardware, and instead keep compute power focused on the parts of the game loop that matter: input, simulation and rendering.
On the graphics side, OP Gaming Core introduces what the company calls Next-Gen HyperRendering, built on years of internal work on high-frame-rate gaming. The new pipeline reconstructs GPU behaviour at the Vulkan driver layer and, according to OnePlus, delivers an 80 percent improvement in per-frame rendering efficiency through optimised instruction logic. Instead of relying on a separate interpolation chip to fake additional frames, OP Gaming Core integrates both native rendering and frame interpolation directly into the main chipset, simplifying the path from game engine to display.
That choice has a direct impact on feel. Removing an extra hop in the rendering path also removes latency, the micro-delays that make a game look smooth but feel slow to respond. In practice, OnePlus says this allows devices to maintain stable 120 frames per second experiences with minimal frame rate fluctuations, even in demanding open-world titles, while also improving power efficiency and thermal behaviour. The company also highlights that the high-frame-rate experience enabled by the new rendering path can be properly captured and shared through screen recording, which has often been a weak link on aggressively tuned gaming modes.
OP Performance Tri-Chip: Splitting The Brain
If OP Gaming Core is the brain, OP Performance Tri-Chip is the skeleton and nerves. It is a full-link hardware solution built around three physical chips: a Performance Chip, a Touch Response Chip and a Wi-Fi Chip G2, each aimed at a different bottleneck in the gaming experience.
On the computation side, the Performance Chip is essentially the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform with OP Gaming Core integrated “out of the box”. Rather than chase only peak benchmark numbers, OnePlus says this configuration is tuned for sustained gaming performance — stable clocks, predictable power delivery and behaviour that does not crater after the first ten minutes of play.
Touch, where games are actually lived on a smartphone, is offloaded to a dedicated Touch Response Chip. On paper, this supports a 330Hz touch sampling rate along with an ultra-high 3200Hz instantaneous sampling rate. It also runs the Next-Gen HyperTouch engine, which spans hardware and software. The idea, OnePlus argues, is that by peeling touch processing away from the main SoC and treating it as a first-class citizen, input becomes faster, more accurate and more reliable. For users, that should mean fewer missed flicks and taps under pressure and snappier everyday scrolling.
The most unusual element in the trio is the Wi-Fi Chip G2, which moves wireless connectivity off the main SoC into a dedicated chip with its own radio frequency modules and algorithms including SmartLink. Campos underlines why this matters by appealing to how frustration actually feels when a match collapses mid-way. “When you think about gaming and playing, you want to have fun. How does fun translate when we are playing? It translates into seamless, uninterrupted gameplay,” he says, spelling out the emotional impact of even minor glitches. “If you have any kind of distraction, if anything isn’t working as it should and you notice it, the fun will diminish. Yeah, right? You’re going to feel annoyed,” he adds.
To make the role of connectivity clearer, he borrows an analogy from the world of content creation. “We say that audio is 50 percent of the video. Yeah, right? So, Wi-Fi is 50 percent of the gaming experience right now,” Campos explains. The Wi-Fi Chip G2 is therefore designed to optimise connection stability in weak signal environments, cut down on stutter when networks are congested and intelligently identify and prioritise gaming traffic so that background downloads or notifications do not destroy a crucial moment. If everything works as intended, the most important compliment it will receive is silence: players will not have to think about connectivity at all.
OP FPS Max: Chasing 165 Frames Per Second
The third major strand is OP FPS Max, a high-frame-rate gaming ecosystem that OnePlus says has been in development for three years. This is where the long-standing “fast and smooth” tagline crystallises into specific targets: 165Hz displays, 165 frames per second gameplay and a supporting layer of software and partnerships.
OP FPS Max is built around a customised 165Hz panel that can render true native 165 frames per second, rather than relying solely on interpolation. OP Gaming Core sits underneath, tasked with feeding that display with consistent frame delivery rather than erratic spikes. The refinements from the Tri-Chip system — faster touch, more stable Wi-Fi — are treated as essential elements of the experience, not optional extras tagged on at the end.
According to OnePlus, the technology already enables seamless 165 frames per second gameplay across multiple popular titles, and the company says it is working with game studios to expand support. The broader goal is to normalise very high frame rates on mobile, turning them from a specialist feature on niche gaming phones into a mainstream expectation on core flagships.
Fragmentation, Forks And Qualcomm
Android gaming has long struggled with fragmentation: different devices ship with different chips and GPUs, engines such as Unity and Unreal see uneven levels of optimisation, and features often land on one brand or one generation and never make it to the rest. Campos is keen to argue that OnePlus’s approach is designed to reduce those forks, not introduce new ones.
“This is not a fork in the road,” he says, when the topic of fragmentation is raised. “Yeah, because we are using the same platform—we’re using Snapdragon, which is the most widely used platform in the world for Android smartphones. Yeah, and right now, they are leading in performance,” he explains, positioning the work as an extension of an existing standard rather than a proprietary island. The choice to lean into Qualcomm rather than around it is deliberate. “Rather than creating a dedicated chip for better performance, we decided to collaborate with Qualcomm and enhance the performance right from the chip itself. By doing that, we enable all developers worldwide to take advantage of it. So, we’re not trying to create a fork; it’s the other way around. We’re trying to eliminate forks from the path,” Campos adds.
That collaboration also explains why he becomes almost boyishly animated when talking about the new low-level access. “This is an amazing partnership because, for the first time, we are able to get inside the core of the CPU and GPU and add our own lines of code,” he says, stressing how unusual that access is. “We have incorporated more than 25,000 lines of code inside the CPU and GPU, and we decided to use most of it for gaming performance. Okay? So, I think this is an amazing advantage for those looking for the best possible performance in a smartphone because if it's good for gaming, it's good for everything,” he argues. In other words, the harshest workload — gaming — becomes the proving ground for improvements that should benefit every other part of the system.
What It Means If You Never Game
For people who never load a game on their phone, all this talk of frames and schedulers can sound like a niche obsession. The underlying principles, however, map neatly onto everyday use cases far beyond battle royale lobbies.
A CPU that needs fewer instructions for key tasks can draw less power and stay cooler, which helps when recording long videos or juggling multiple apps. A GPU that processes frames more efficiently can make camera previews, interface animations and media playback feel smoother and more consistent. A dedicated touch chip tuned for accuracy can make every swipe, scroll and type cleaner. A Wi-Fi path that treats time-sensitive traffic with greater priority can improve video calls, streaming and cloud apps, not just multiplayer matches. By designing for gaming, OnePlus is effectively designing for the worst case — and then letting everyone else benefit.
The point, therefore, is not that the company is turning its flagships into specialist gaming handsets. It is that gaming has become the design target for a broader performance architecture that is meant to hold up under any workload.
Betting The 15 Series — And Beyond
The natural question is whether this is a one-off experiment or the template for everything that follows. Campos is clear that the ambition stretches beyond a single launch, even if he will not specify exact product roadmaps. “Yes, look, what we are showcasing right now at this event is something we want to extend to future products as much as possible. Okay?” he says, sketching out the intent. “So, I can’t tell you right now which products will have what, but I can tell you that OP15 will have it because we’ve confirmed that here. However, we want to have more products in the future—that's our goal. That’s why we organized this event; we want to talk about the gaming technologies because that’s something we want to expand,” he explains.
That makes the upcoming OnePlus 15 Series the first live test of the Overpower philosophy rather than its final destination. If OP Gaming Core, OP Performance Tri-Chip and OP FPS Max work as advertised, they could become the new baseline for how the brand thinks about performance. If they do not, gamers — and the broader community that has never been shy about giving feedback — are unlikely to stay quiet.
Campos appears comfortable with the scrutiny that will follow, perhaps because his own relationship with games has already forced some hard choices. “Oh my god, I play everywhere, everything!” he says, when the conversation turns to what currently lives on his devices. “On smartphones, I love Diablo Immortal. I had to stop playing because I was so addicted that it was causing me problems in my life. Yeah, I had to take a break for a while,” he admits.
His tastes are broad and platform-agnostic, something he wears almost as a badge of honour. He talks fondly about Nintendo — “I’m a big fan of Nintendo,” he says — and dips into Mario Run and Mario Kart when he wants something lighter on a phone, while also splitting his time across Xbox and PlayStation. The philosophy that underpins those choices is disarmingly straightforward. “I’m a big gaming enthusiast—I play everywhere! For me, platform preference doesn’t matter. Yeah, I think if you’re playing games to have fun, it doesn't matter what platform it is. As long as you’re having fun, that’s what counts. If you’re not having fun, then why are you playing?” he says.
Strip away the chip diagrams and the acronyms, and that line reads like a manifesto. If Overpower works, most users will never talk about OP Gaming Core, OP Performance Tri-Chip or OP FPS Max. They will talk about games that feel smoother, phones that stay cooler for longer and Wi-Fi that does not collapse mid-match. They will talk, in other words, about fun.
For a company that built its reputation on speed, that may be the most overpowered outcome of all. |
