I benchmarked my first Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phone and it (almost) lives up to the hype

The first flagship smartphones packed with the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset are already here. After an impressive showing in a reference phone, we can finally test how Qualcomm’s latest piece of flagship silicon stacks up in retail handsets and whether Qualcomm retains the performance crown for another year.

We have the new Nuvia REDMAGIC 11 Pro in for today’s benchmarking session — a dedicated gaming phone boasting advanced cooling, 144Hz display, and up to 24GB of RAM. It should represent one of the best implementations of the 8 Elite Gen 5, but we’ll let the results do the talking. I tested with Nuvia’s gaming mode enabled and disabled, and obtained higher performance from the latter. In contrast, the gaming mode prioritized lower temperatures and power draw, so I left it disabled.

Starting with the CPU via GeekBench 6, we can see that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s custom Oryon CPU cores continue to blow past the competition. It leaves Google’s Pixel 10 Pro XL in the dust, but that was to be expected. Compared to last year’s REDMAGIC 10 Pro sporting the original Snapdragon 8 Elite, the Gen 5 inside the latest REDMAGIC sports a 15% gain in single-core CPU performance and a 14% uplift in multi-core scores.

That’s a solid gain, but not quite the 20% improvement that Qualcomm claimed in its launch marketing material. Still, it’s enough to keep its custom CPU cores ahead of the new Arm C1-Ultra inside MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500. In this CPU benchmark, the REDMAGIC is 7.5% faster in single-core and 14.7% faster in multi-core tests than the vivo X300 Pro.

It’s a similar tale in the graphics department. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s latest Adreno GPU scored a 13.5% win in 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test compared to last year, and a more noticeable 17% gain in the ray-tracing Solar Bay test — roughly matching what we saw from the reference unit.

These are solid wins, but again, they fall somewhat short of Qualcomm’s 23% boast. Still, this is more than enough to keep the latest Snapdragon well out in front in the graphics department, offering anywhere from 19% to 38% more performance than the new iPhone, depending on the test at hand. The Dimensity 9500’s G1-Ultra GPU is closer, coming in 12% slower in Wild Life Extreme but leveling the playing field in ray-tracing performance to earn a 1% advantage.

But just as important as raw scores are stress test results, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 seems to perform well here too — at least with the benefits of gaming phone cooling.

Overall stability is much improved compared to last year’s model, with no dramatic drop in performance come the end of the test. The phone still benchmarks very hot, peaking at 56.0°C compared to last year’s 57.0°C, but it seems to cope better overall, with stability scores in the region of 80% — far better than most of last year’s flagships and the new iPhone.

However, this could be down to the phone’s rather unique cooling setup. Although real games won’t max out the phone quite like this benchmark, the high temperatures here suggest we are likely looking at another hot chipset when running full tilt, and other phones might not handle the heat nearly as well as this gaming handset.

Equally, the gap between the REDMAGIC 11 Pro and last year’s 10 Pro quickly narrows in this stress test, leaving the new model with a far slimmer advantage after just a few minutes of playtime. At least as far as this phone is concerned, the main gaming benefits won’t necessarily be felt in significantly higher frame rates but hopefully in more consistent performance over longer play sessions. That’s no bad thing and is likely more beneficial to today’s high-end titles than another huge raw performance boost.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is an undeniably fast chip. It blasts past Google’s Tensor G5 and outruns its predecessor just as we expected. Importantly, Qualcomm has managed to keep its nose out in front of Apple’s powerhouse A19 Pro, particularly in graphics tests, and has kept MediaTek’s impressive Dimensity 9500 at arm’s length as well.

Still, my first retail phone isn’t a flawless victory for Qualcomm. Somewhat disappointingly, we don’t see Qualcomm’s more significant performance claims bear out — at least not in this particular model. Across all of our benchmarks, the REDMAGIC 11 Pro scored between 3% and 8% slower than when we benchmarked Qualcomm’s reference phone. That’s not a huge amount, and we always expect retail phones to be somewhat more conservative, but it means Snapdragon’s lead perhaps isn’t as large as early claims suggest.

Of course, we’ll have to test a broader range of handsets to see how the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 performs without a gaming phone’s size and cooling benefits. In any case, based on our first results, I certainly wouldn’t recommend upgrading if you’re already running an 8 Elite handset. Perhaps this will also open the door for Samsung’s Exynos 2600 for the Galaxy S26 series to be more competitive than we otherwise might have thought.