Snapdragon 8 Elite crushes A18 Pro in GPU performance while trading blows with Dimensity 9400
Qualcomm's recently unveiled Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC steps into the spotlight as the successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 flagship SoC for smartphones and tablets. If early benchmarks are anything to go by, it seems that the Snapdragon 8 Elite is already sizing up to be a formidable competitor to MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 as well as Apple's A18 Pro.
In terms of CPU performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite appears to have finally outpaced Apple's A18 Pro in the multi-core department. According to Geekerwan's analysis, the Snapdragon 8 Elite manages to break through the 10,000-point barrier, clocking in a whopping 10,521 points in Geekbench 6. In single-core, however, the 8 Elite continues to lag behind Apple's latest, despite featuring a healthy generational boost.
On the GPU side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite's Adreno GPU does not pull any punches. It raked in an impressive 18,007 points in Geekbench 6's OpenCL test, which is a substantially higher score than the ~16,000 points that the Dimensity 9400 managed. Of course, the performance of the GPU will be greatly influenced by the thermal envelope of the host smartphone, which is to be kept in mind.
According to Geekerwan's recent analysis of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its Adreno GPU is almost neck and neck with the Dimensity 9400's Immortalis-G925 with a remarkably similar efficiency curve. With a score of around 2,600 points, both the chips are well ahead of the A18 Pro, which managed only around 2,100 points while consuming slightly more power than the rest.
Geekerwan also conducted a real-life gaming test with Honkai Impact 3, and the story was much the same. The Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 managed to maintain around 60 FPS FPS at 'very high' settings over a 30-minute gaming session, with a power consumption of 6.2 and 6.0 watts respectively. The A18 Pro could only manage 51.2 FPS while consuming around 5.5 watts.
Evidently, Qualcomm's decision to go the custom route with the Snapdragon 8 Elite appears to have paid off pretty neatly. The SoC is now more powerful and efficient than ever before, and has even managed to beat Apple's A18 Pro in GPU and multi-core CPU tests. That said, in single-core performance and overall CPU efficiency, however, Apple continues to reign supreme, but the gap is now slimmer than ever before.
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