In case you missed our other coverage from Snapdragon Summit 2024, new second-generation Snapdragon X2 Elite chips for Windows on Arm laptops, as well as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5—Qualcomm’s fastest mobile parts ever—are on the way. The company’s made some bold claims about performance, but of course, independent benchmarks will tell the full story.
Retail devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 won’t be launching for a while yet, but our man on the scene Dave Altavilla got a few minutes alone with one of the test platforms and was able to crank out some benchmarks. We’ve studiously compiled some test data from other devices and we’re going to present them for you here as a preview of what these parts can do.
Geekbench Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Results
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world workloads in image processing and particle physics calculation scenarios. We tested all of the smartphones featured here with Geekbench’s single and multi-core workloads.
In Geekbench 6 we see an absolutely commanding lead. Actually, while they’re not on the chart here, this performance outpaces every stock x86-64 CPU on a single thread, and it beats Apple’s A18 Pro handily, too. In fact, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 test platform is even within striking distance of the Apple M4 in the iPad Pro. Very impressive stuff from Qualcomm here.
Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark
We used BrowserBench.org’s Speedometer test to take a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs a variety of sample web apps using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even simple JavaScript. This test is an example of how a device copes with real-world, modern web apps.
Unsurprisingly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 absolutely dominates in Speedometer, too. This is one of, if not the very highest result we’ve ever seen in this benchmark.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 AnTuTu 8 And AITuTu Benchmarks
AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of metrics ranked with somewhat nebulous scores, rather than frame rates or time to complete. Here we’re running the latest version of AnTuTu across multiple Android devices. AnTuTu returns four top level performance results which are all included here: CPU, RAM, 3D, UX (or User Experience), along with a total score.
Yet another leading result as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 absolutely crushes competition. This performance is bolstered by extremely high scores in the UX and CPU portions of the benchmark, while gains in the Memory and GPU portions are more modest. AI performance also clearly outruns previous-gen devices.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 PCMark For Android Benchmarks
UL’s PCMark for Android is an excellent suite of tests if you want to benchmark a wide range of tasks on any handset — things like image and video editing, as well as lighter-duty, everyday workloads such as email and web browsing. When you see the test running live, it’s clear the scripted application tests are carefully selected and tuned to make use of the each mobile platform in a very controlled way.
Here we see the first misstep for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, although this result doesn’t really line up with the leading scores in the previous benchmarks. Overall, the performance is still fantastic, though.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Graphics Benchmarks
Next, let’s take a look at the S25 Ultra in GFXBench, which has been one of the standard mobile graphics/gaming performance benchmarks for years. To ensure that display refresh (v-sync) and resolution aren’t limiting factors, we’re comparing off-screen test results here. GFXBench tests OpenGL ES graphics workloads and we’re specifically testing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, as well as Vulkan in the latest iterations.
The GFXBench test scenes are simplistic enough that, on high-end devices, they’ve been CPU-limited for years. The tremendous jump in CPU throughput offered by the tuned Oryon 2 cores in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 allows the Adreno GPU to really stretch its legs and simply run away from its previous-gen competition.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 3DMark Benchmarks
UL’s 3DMark Sling Shot is one of several current tests in the 3DMark mobile suite. Unlike previous-gen 3DMark mobile tests, Sling Shot is a much more advanced OpenGL ES 3.1 and Metal API-based benchmark that employs more advanced rendering techniques, like volumetric lighting, particle illumination, multiple render targets, instanced rendering, uniform buffers and transform feedback.
In Sling Shot Extreme, we see a considerable boost to both CPU (Physics) and GPU (Graphics) performance, although the larger boost is to the Physics score, which correlates with what Qualcomm claims about enhanced CPU performance.
3DMark Wild Life is the latest cross-platform test from UL. Its primary purpose is to measure GPU performance across platforms, and two distinct tests are available. The standard Wild Life test is designed to give feedback on how a game performs over a short period of time, while the torture test shows sustained performance over time. We were only able to run the standard test here.
It’s a similar story in Wild Life Unlimited, where the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 absolutely dunks on the performance of the older chips.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Preliminary Thoughts On Performance
These initial results with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 are phenomenal, with the single most impressive comparison of data points undoubtedly being the comparison against the iPhone 16 Pro Max in Speedometer. It’s not necessarily a completely fair comparison—one is a test bench, and the other is someone’s daily driver phone—but Browserbench is Apple’s home ground, and dealing a blow like that is stunning, assuming it translates to retail devices that you can actually purchase.
Indeed, as exciting as these benchmarks are, it’s critical to remember that these results are from a prototype platform and likely represent a best-case scenario. Historically, benchmarks performed on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon mobile test platforms have been somewhat higher than retail devices, but that’s well-known at this point, and the differences were typically only a few percentage points. All that said, we’re extremely eager to see what Snapdragon’s 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs look like in final hardware.
