Overclocked Adreno 650 outperforms the Snapdragon 888's Adreno 660 in Genshin Impact and other benchmarks

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 was chided by reviewers, enthusiasts, and fans for its bad thermals. While it does offer significant improvements over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 865, its sustained performance isn't something to write home about. An XDA Developers member reached out to us with a great example of how the Snapdragon 865 holds up against its predecessor.

XDA senior member astronomy2021 (thanks for the tip, Matthew) overclocked the Snapdragon 865's Adreno 650 GPU to 940Hz, nearly double its base clock of 587MHz. The overclock, along with OpenGL 604 drivers, let the GPU trounce the Snapdragon 888's Adreno 660 in a wide range of real-world and synthetic benchmarks such as AnTuTu, 3D Mark Wild Life, GFXBench and Genshin Impact. The best part is that the Adreno 650 consumed 7.2W on average at peak loads, whereas the Adreno 660 drew up to 11W.

The Snapdragon 865's stellar performance over the Snapdragon 888 serves as a grim reminder of the latter's shortcomings. Many would blame it on Samsung's N5 node, on which the chipset is based, and they wouldn't be wrong, as the same issues also afflict the similarly-specced Exynos 2100. The Snapdragon 865 was the last Qualcomm chipset to use TSMC's 7nm node, and it stands as a testament to the Taiwanese chipmakers' superiority over its competitors.

OP used a Xiaomi Mi 10T with 8GB of RAM as a vessel for the Snapdragon 865 and an Asus ROG Phone 5 for the Snapdragon 888. You can find out more about the specifics of the test methodology at this XDA Forums thread. Note that the process is cumbersome and requires in-depth knowledge of Android. We recommend that you do not try to replicate it unless you're well versed with overclocking smartphones.