Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 edges past the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in early benchmark tests

Qualcomm launched its latest sub-premium chipset, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, last week. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 directly succeeds last year's Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, and while no device featuring the chipset has officially launched, benchmarks from Qualcomm's reference design unit have now been revealed.

As tested by Geekerwan, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 achieves a single-core score of 2,263, and a multi-core score of 7,414. Comparatively, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on last year's Xiaomi 14 (buy on Amazon) is recorded with a 2213 single-core score and a 7454 multi-core one. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4's CPU scores are comparable to our test results of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and outright outperforms several Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones on our database.

It's a similar situation in the GPU department, with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 narrowly edging out the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on 3DMark's Steel Nomad Light test. On the WildLife Extreme test, however, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 scores 5,100 vs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's 5,214. On games like Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 also pulled slightly higher frame rates, suffered lower FPS drops, and drew less power than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered OnePlus Ace 3 Pro.

Evidently, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is comparable to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 across all metrics. The new chipset matches last year's flagship SoC on CPU tests, and appears to hold a slight advantage on the GPU side. Of course, it's important to remember that these tests were on a QRD device—typically indicating a best-case scenario application for the chipset—while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices it was benchmarked against were all actual retail units.