Google Tensor G4 fails to outscore Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and barely beats Tensor G3 in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme

As Google explained, the Tensor G4 wasn't designed to beat other flagships in benchmarks. Instead, it mainly aims to excel in areas where the company wants it to shine, which, as we covered earlier, is mostly AI. Even so, smartphone buyers these days do a lot with their phones, especially gaming.

Early benchmarks have already shown that the new Pixel 9 SoC can't perform as well as the current-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Dimensity 9300. Now, another benchmark comparison has shown that it can't even beat the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, a flagship chipset from 2021.

This benchmark comparison comes from Golden Reviewer, who has put up a detailed list of how the Tensor G4 compares against some of the notable flagships in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme. The good part is that the new Pixel 9 SoC can beat its predecessor, but only with a slightly higher score.

More specifically, per the chart, the Google Tensor G3 scores 2,445 points, while the new chipset gets 2,618. That means the Tensor G4 only has a little over 7% lead over its predecessor. On the bright side, the Pixel 9 chipset is shown to be more efficient in the benchmark.

The chart further shows that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 can score 2,670 points, which is about 2% higher than the Tensor G4. Given that it's compared to a 2021 SoC, this score isn't a piece of good news for the Pixel 9 chipset.

Regarding how it compares with current-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, there's a big difference. To be precise, the latest Qualcomm chipset has a score of 5,453 points. Compared to the Pixel 9 SoC, that's over 100% higher.

But again, Google has already described that the Tensor G4 wasn't designed to score high in benchmarks. Even so, seeing such a small performance gap against the SoC of Pixel 8 (128 GB curr. $499 on Amazon) is a little disappointing. Hopefully, the case won't be the same for the 2025 successor, as it's expected to be mass-produced on a second-gen 3nm TSMC process.