Snapdragon 8 Elite Tested: Benchmarks and Thermals

Qualcomm recently announced its flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset for Android phones, and we finally have access to Realme GT7 Pro that packs the powerful processor. So to test Qualcomm’s claims, we ran several benchmarks on Snapdragon 8 Elite including Geekbench, AnTuTu, 3DMark, and more. We have also recorded the temperature to understand the thermal performance of the chipset. On that note, let’s begin.

Note:
We benchmarked the Realme GT7 Pro, powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. In our initial testing, the phone got abnormally hot. However, after rebooting the device multiple times, the chip performed well and maintained a normal temperature.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Specifications

Snapdragon 8 Elite: Geekbench 6 CPU

In the Geekbench CPU test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite scored 3,033 in the single-core test and 9,271 in the multi-core test. Keep in mind that Snapdragon 8 Elite’s Oryon CPU is still based on the older Armv8 architecture. Hence, it has no SME units resulting in slightly lower Geekbench scores than Apple’s A18 Pro in single-core tasks.

What is remarkable is that the 2nd-gen Oryon cores are really efficient as Qualcomm claimed. After the intensive CPU test, the surface temperature hovered around 33 degrees C which is fantastic. And the CPU under max single-threaded load, consumes around 6W to 7W.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: AnTuTu Benchmark

In our AnTuTu benchmark test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite scored 2,759,190 points. It fell short of crossing the 3 million mark as initial leaks suggested. Nevertheless, Snapdragon 8 Elite has set a new benchmark in mobile computing. The CPU scored 583,775 points and the new Adreno 830 GPU alone achieved a massive 1,132,574 points. After the AnTuTu test, the temperature was close to 36.6 degrees C which is again impressive.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: CPU Throttling Test

We have seen that flagship chipsets don’t do well in the CPU Throttling test as it gets harder to sustain maximum performance on big CPU cores, running at much higher frequencies. That said, the Snapdragon 8 Elite performed exceptionally well.

In our 15-minute stress test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU throttled to 74% of its maximum performance. And in a longer 60-minute test, the CPU throttled to 77%. Basically, for sustained CPU performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite hits it out of the park. Not to mention, the temperature remained around 39 degrees C.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: Geekbench 6 GPU

Moving to the Geekbench 6 GPU test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s Adreno 830 GPU scored 19,193 points on OpenCL and 24,462 on Vulkan graphics API. The scores are 40% higher than what Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 achieved so yes, the GPU has been upgraded significantly.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: 3DMark Tests

To test the Adreno 830 GPU further, we ran several graphics-intensive 3DMark tests. In the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite achieved the best loop score of 6,311 points and the lowest loop score of 5,258 with a remarkable stability of 83.3%. And the surface temperature also remained manageable, around 42.5 degrees C.

Next, in the 3DMark Solar Bay test that evaluates the ray-tracing capability, Snapdragon 8 Elite’s GPU got an overall score of 10,614 points. And in the demanding 3DMark Steel Nomad Light test, the Adreno 830 GPU gets 2,201 points. Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers significant improvements in graphics performance and efficiency.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: Geekbench AI

Finally, coming to the Geekbench AI test that evaluates the NPU. It seems Qualcomm has not prepared the driver stack for the new Hexagon NPU on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. We had to run the test on the deprecated NNAPI framework, resulting in much lower scores. We hope that Qualcomm brings support for QNN so we can really see how well the NPU performs on AI workloads.

As for on-device LLM performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite generated responses at 20 tokens per second which is pretty good. I think the inference was done on the CPU so CPU-based AI performance looks promising.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Benchmark: The Verdict

To conclude, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is a monumental upgrade over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The 2nd-gen Oryon CPU cores are very powerful and at the same time, efficient too, despite running two cores at a mighty 4.32GHz. The new sliced GPU architecture implemented in Snapdragon 8 Elite has resulted in remarkable gaming performance.