Power-hungry Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 gets trounced by the Apple A15 Bionic in real-world gaming test

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's limitations are already known. While the Qualcomm flagship chipset offers solid peak CPU and GPU performance in synthetic benchmarks, it appears to struggle a bit in sustained performance, and nothing better showcases that than a gaming comparison versus the iPhone 13 Pro Max and its A15 Bionic.

As tested by Golden Reviewer, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 gets easily dominated by Apple's A15 Bionic in a 10-minute Genshin Impact test. While both chipsets throttled, the A15 Bionic handled that a lot better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, going from 57 fps on average to 48 fps in the second half of the test. The Qualcomm chipset throttled a lot quicker as well, only managing to hold on to high frame rates for the first minute of the test, before averaging 46 fps over the remaining nine minutes. 

As previously mentioned, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's biggest issue appears to be power consumption. Even in the first minute of the test when it delivered similar performance as the A15 Bionic, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 averaged over 9w of power, whereas the iPhone 13 Pro Max's chipset only used a modest 5.2w of power. The real kicker here is that even when throttling, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's 7.7w power consumption average also far exceeds the A15 Bionic's power consumption while at full tilt.

This test was carried out on the Motorola Edge X30, so thermal management and software of the specific phone may have had a hand in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's disappointing performance. For what it's worth, though, similar tests on the Xiaomi 12 series have yielded identical results. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performs on phones like the Redmi K50 Gaming and Nubia RedMagic 7 with their promised cooling solutions.

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