Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 benchmarks: Just how badly does it beat its rivals?

Whenever a new chipset is announced, the first question on every enthusiast’s lips is “how well does it perform?” Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is no exception. While we’ll have to wait not too long to get our hands on the first consumer devices, we went hands-on with a reference handset at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit that gives us some indication of the chip’s peak potential.

Just a word of caution: retail handsets are unlikely to perform quite as well, owing to their more consumer-friendly form factors and prioritization of battery life and other features over raw chipset performance. As for the specs of the reference unit, Qualcomm paired its 8 Elite Gen 5 with a massive 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, 1TB UFS4.1 storage, and a 6.8-inch 3,200×1,440 AMOLED LTPO display. So, a very high-end setup.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 benchmarks

We’ll start with the CPU; the third revision of Qualcomm’s custom Oryon CPU cores built on the Arm architecture. Qualcomm cranked the Prime core peak clock speeds up to 4.6GHz, from an already speedy 4.32GHz with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, while the Performance cores can hit 3.62GHz. Combined with some architecture and cache revisions, Qualcomm claims this can result in up to 20% better performance with 16% better power efficiency.

The performance claims hold up reasonably well against last year’s reference unit in Geekbench 6 (yes, I’ve been keeping tabs). Single and multi-core performance registers 19% gains. More impressive, though, is that if you go back two years, the 8 Elite Gen 5 is 65% faster in both tests than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That’s a massive increase in peak performance in just two years — those custom CPU cores really have paid dividends.

Looking at some real handsets, we can see roughly where upcoming Gen 5 phones will sit. Qualcomm’s new chip flies past the capabilities of Google’s Tensor G5, and its multi-core score even leaves Apple’s new A19 Pro chip in the dust — it’s 25% faster. While far more performance than you need for browsing the web, this super-quick multi-core score will come in handy for video editing, gaming, and perhaps even running AI tasks directly on the CPU, especially now that the Snapdragon’s CPU supports SME.

When it comes to single-core brute force, which is admittedly less critical these days, though still plays a crucial role in data-heavy workloads, the custom Arm CPU cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm are now neck and neck (less than 1% difference), offering a solid level-up on last-generation handsets. Google’s previously snappy but aging Arm Cortex-X4 big CPU looks slow by comparison.

Qualcomm claims up to 23% better graphics performance and up to 20% lower power consumption for its new Adreno GPU — a combination that promises a potent gaming experience.

We didn’t have time to run every benchmark in our limited session, but Qualcomm provided some 3DMark Unlimited mode (off-screen, 2560×1440) figures for the Gen 5 in advance. Their headline improvement is a bit optimistic compared to last year’s quoted FPS for the same tests: depending on the workload, I calculate improvements between 15% and 18%, which is more modest.

For context, I also converted Qualcomm’s FPS numbers into 3DMark scores to compare directly with retail handsets. However, off-screen tests are always rendered at 2560×1440, while real devices run at varying native resolutions that are often a smidgen lower. Still, Qualcomm’s new chipset is 23% faster than the OnePlus 13 — right on its quoted figure. The new Adreno GPU is clearly very fast.

Comparisons against the slightly overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy in Samsung’s S25 Ultra show smaller gains: 21% faster in Wild Life Extreme and 18% faster in the ray-tracing Solar Bay. The latest Snapdragon also maintains a modest lead over Apple’s latest iPhone in ray tracing. Even so, Qualcomm’s 23% yearly claim seems like a best-case scenario.

We did have time to run a single Wild Life Stress Test to verify Qualcomm’s graphics performance claims. Our first-run figure wasn’t quite as good as Qualcomm’s supposed best (29,258 vs. 30,561), so I’d take the previous results with a pinch of salt as far as retail models go. Still, I’m more concerned about the chip’s sustained performance.

While the reference phone survived four full runs at full tilt, performance after that point quickly collapsed to the same ballpark as last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite — a nosedive that dropped to just 58% of its peak performance. As has been the case in previous years, I expect that retail phones with a more conservative approach to battery drain and thermals may pull back on the performance lever even sooner.

If you’re a gamer hoping that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 wouldn’t throttle back quite as much as the original 8 Elite, the initial verdict is mixed. Most games aren’t as demanding as these stress tests, but long sessions in warm places will undoubtedly see some performance throttling, especially for more graphically intensive games and emulators.

In addition to traditional performance metrics, Qualcomm also dished out some machine learning workload results from the MLPerf AI benchmark.

AI benchmark performance varies widely by workload, and this chipset is no exception. Image classification is modestly improved by 19%, whereas image segmentation and super-resolution workloads are up to 55% faster than the previous generation. Qualcomm’s headline claim for the Hexagon NPU is a 37% improvement, but as we see here, real-world results can fall slightly below or exceed that number depending on the task.

That said, this depends on the AI app in question correctly leveraging Qualcomm’s latest AI, which is notoriously difficult without developers spending time in chipset-specific API libraries. Thankfully, the 8 Elite Gen 5 includes a backup option in the form of its CPU’s new SME capabilities. While that won’t match the NPU’s peak speeds, it will provide performance gains above and beyond the baseline CPU uplift in instances where AI tasks run directly on the CPU.

A handful of brands confirmed they have Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 handsets in the works, some of which are set to launch before the end of the year. The Xiaomi 17 series is confirmed, the OnePlus 15 and other Chinese models are expected before the year’s end, and the Samsung Galaxy S26 series should follow in early 2026 — we’ll be spoiled for choice before we know it. But should you wait to buy one?

If you’re not in a rush, there’s no harm in waiting — though not necessarily just for the performance improvements detailed here. Phones already on the market are more than fast enough for even the most demanding use cases. Instead, it might be worth watching for camera, charging, and battery life upgrades that could make more meaningful differences to your everyday use.

That said, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 represents the next step in mobile computing: faster AI, ray-tracing-ready graphics, and efficiency improvements that will shape future apps and games. You don’t have to wait, but if you do, you’ll get a slightly faster, more capable phone that should age gracefully, provided you’re mindful of sustained performance under heavy workloads.