Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 first-party benchmarks show sizable graphics uplift over Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Qualcomm has supplied its expected benchmark figures for the newly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, giving us a detailed look at how the new flagship SoC compares with last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The numbers are first-party results from Qualcomm reference hardware, so real-world performance will depend on cooling, power limits, and individual OEM implementations.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 sits above the regular Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in Qualcomm's new two-chip hierarchy. It uses the company's latest Oryon CPU and a reworked Adreno GPU on a 2 nm process, with its two prime CPU cores capable of reaching 5 GHz. Qualcomm officially claims a 13% CPU performance improvement, a 44% GPU performance increase and a 35% faster Hexagon NPU compared with the previous generation.

Qualcomm's benchmarks include direct comparisons with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in commonly referenced tests like Geekbench 6. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 scores between 4,309 and 4,332 in Geekbench 6.5 single-core, compared with 3,825 to 3,900 for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, effectively putting the new chip roughly 11.9% ahead. The multi-core improvement isn’t nearly as impressive. Qualcomm lists 12,954 to 13,056 for the Extreme Gen 6 versus 12,200 to 12,350 for its predecessor. That's an average improvement of about 5.9%

Browser performance appears to have taken a substantially bigger step. Both generations were tested with Speedometer 3.1 in Chrome v139 using the same 12-model methodology. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 scored between 48 and 49, while the Extreme Gen 6 increased it to 59.5-60.4, representing a 23.6% improvement.

In AITutu-CV V3, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 reference platform scored around 2.5 million, whereas the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 reaches 2,903,533, an improvement of roughly 16%. The Extreme Gen 6 scores between 5,606,990 and 5,619,756 in AnTuTu, but Qualcomm has moved from AnTuTu v11 on its Gen 5 benchmark suite to AnTuTu v12 for the new chip. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's 4.25-4.5 million result therefore cannot be used for a meaningful comparison.

Geekbench 7 paints a much more dramatic picture, although the comparison comes with an important caveat. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 scores between 3,599 and 3,624 in Geekbench 7 single-core and 12,281 to 12,491 in multi-core. Primate Labs previously provided us with preliminary Geekbench 7 results for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 running in a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. That device returned approximately 2,702 points in single-core and 9,736 points in multi-core.

Comparing those figures puts the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 around 34% ahead in single-core performance and roughly 27% ahead in multi-core performance. However, this should not be treated as a strict apples-to-apples generational uplift. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 figures came from an actual Galaxy S25 Ultra tested by Primate Labs, whereas Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 figures are expected results from its reference platform. 

The 3DMark data points mentioned above were converted to FPS for comparison using UL Benchmark's formula for Wild Life and Steel Nomad, giving us a better idea of the new Adreno GPU's performance improvement. Sadly, AIMark moved from V2 to V3, and MLPerf moved from V2 to V6. Qualcomm's eye-catching AI figures, including 3,659,031 in AITutu-LLM V3 and 835,052 in AIMark VLM V3, are useful indicators of the new platform's capabilities but don't all allow direct generational comparisons.

One new test also shows off Qualcomm's Adreno Neural Fusion technology. In Traverse Evolve, the Extreme Gen 6 reportedly runs at 17.8 FPS natively but reaches 52.2 FPS with upscaling and frame generation enabled, which Qualcomm calculates as a 193.3% increase. At a fixed 10 FPS target, the company claims power consumption drops from 5.6 W natively to 1.0 W with upscaling, an 81% reduction.