The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 disappoints in early real-world gaming tests

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is Qualcomm's latest and greatest flagship chipset yet. It already faces stiff competition from the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 and the upcoming Exynos 2200 but may not quite be up to the task, at least if early gaming tests are anything to go by. 

As tested by Golden Reviewer, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 on the Motorola Edge X30 puts up an unconvincing display in a 10 minutes Genshin Impact test. The source routinely tests new chipsets to give a closer look at real-world sustained performance, with Google's Tensor recently also disappointing.

On the test, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 starts off strong, delivering about 60 FPS for the first few minutes. A little over two minutes in, however, it sees its first dip in performance, dropping as low as 43 FPS. Over the first half of the test, it manages to average circa 53 FPS, while drawing about 8.7 W. In the second half of the test, things mostly fall apart, with the phone holding an average of 48 FPS, but routinely falling lower than 40 FPS. Power consumption over that period is a more reasonable 6.3 W. Temperature-wise, the Moto Edge X30 gets as high as 46°C at its hottest areas.

While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's performance isn't as bad as that of the Google Tensor, it's supposed to be built on the newest architecture, so this is disappointing either way. FPS drops of up to 40% during the duration of a 10-minute test make for a rather disappointing performance. From most available tests, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 lags behind the Dimensity 9000, with the MediaTek chipset having TSMC's superior node to thank.

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