Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 benchmarks reveal Qualcomm's dominance yet again

If there's any question of who makes the best mobile chipsets, Qualcomm is putting that definitively to bed with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The switch to a fully-custom design — made possible with the Nuvia acquisition — gave Qualcomm a distinct advantage, and it's making effective use of that this year.

Awkward naming aside, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 delivers considerable upgrades to last year, with Qualcomm touting a huge 20% increase in CPU performance, while somehow simultaneously hitting 35% better efficiency. It's clear that Qualcomm set out to establish itself as the dominant chip vendor with the introduction of the platform, and early benchmarking tests indicate just how much of a lead the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has this year over devices like the Vivo X200 Ultra and Galaxy S25 models.

My colleague Derrek Lee is at the annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, and he was able to use a Qualcomm reference device powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to run synthetic benchmarks.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5: Domineering CPU performance

Let's start with Geekbench; the utility does a good job emulating real-world usage scenarios, and it's a decent predictor of how fast a chipset is. Qualcomm and MediaTek always did well in this area when they used standard Arm cores, but Apple came in and took the overall lead by leveraging a custom design. That's why A series silicon dominated Geekbench charts for the better part of the last six years.

With the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm is once again asserting its dominance. The chipset managed to get 12,170 in Geekbench's multi-core tests, and that's wild — that's at least 15% better than anything else available today. Even the latest A19 Pro silicon only goes up to 10,500, signaling the gulf that exists between Qualcomm and the rest of the field.

It's a similar story with single-core results as well. With a result of 3,832 in Geekbench 6, Qualcomm is showing that it's able to hold onto the lead in this category. Qualcomm isn't going into too much detail about the internals of the Oryon cores and the underlying architecture, but seeing as how it underpins the chip vendor's computing efforts — both on mobile and PC — it's evident just how much of an impact a custom design has. That's not a new thing; Apple has shown time and again that it's able to deliver in this area, both with the A series silicon and its M range of chipsets that it uses on MacBooks and iPads.

With Qualcomm doubling down on its custom design, it has an outsized lead in the context of Android phones. MediaTek's Dimensity, Google Tensor, and Samsung Exynos all use regular Arm cores, and while they're great in their own right — I'm excited to see what Arm's C1 Ultra and C1 Pro manage to offer with the Dimensity 9400 — but it's likely that the gains won't be as high as what Qualcomm is delivering this year.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5: Adreno blazes ahead

Qualcomm is making decent inroads with the Adreno GPU as well, touting 23% improved performance alongside 20%better efficiency. We usually see these kinds of gains when a chip vendor moves to a new node, but Qualcomm is using the same 3nm TSMC node as last year, making the improvements all the more impressive.

Another interesting highlight is that Qualcomm now offers Unreal Engine 5 integration with its mobile chipset, making it easier to get console-quality games on Android. This has been an area where Apple had a distinct advantage thanks to its vertical integration, and Qualcomm is aiming to address that. We'll have to wait and see if it leads to any meaningful change when it comes to Android gaming — I'm yet to play a decent title with ray tracing — but Qualcomm is putting in the legwork.

3DMark's Wild Like Extreme showcases the gains on offer this year. While these benchmarks aren't indicative of real-world use, they allow us to see how much things change year-on-year, and the results showcase the potential of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. We are coming to a point where it isn't the hardware, but the quality of the games that's the bottleneck on Android.

I'm excited to get my hands on devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Phone manufacturers don't tend to wait too long before releasing devices, with Xiaomi, Realme, and Honor slated to roll out phones featuring Qualcomm's latest silicon in the coming weeks. With the Dimensity 9500-powered OPPO Find X9 Pro also debuting globally soon, we don't have to wait too long to see how Qualcomm and MediaTek's chipsets hold up in real-world scenarios. Until then, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 benchmarks suggest next year's flagships should be highly interesting.