The first phones with the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 have already been announced, but they are not available just yet. That said, we have a prototype device on hand that we can use for the first round of benchmarks. We can’t show it to you yet, but here’s a sneak peek at the Realme GT 8 Pro prototype:
Let’s get a closer look at the chip first. The 8-core CPU features third-generation Oryon cores – two big ones and six medium. The big cores can reach new heights in terms of smartphone clock speed, going up to 4.61GHz. Overall, the CPU is expected to deliver a 20% performance improvement compared to the previous generation. The new CPU is 35% more power efficient, which in turn makes the whole chipset 16% more efficient. Note: we will run battery life tests once we have market-ready phones.
The latest Adreno GPU also promises power savings (up to 20%) as well as a 23% increase in overall performance. The Adreno High Performance Memory (HPM) is 18MB of dedicated memory that improves efficiency and speed.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Now for the benchmarks. Rather than comparing individual devices, we decided to take the average for several major flagship chips that were relevant in 2025 and 2024 to see how the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 compares.
Starting with AnTuTu 10, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 prototype got within arm’s reach of 3 million points. A 20% improvement is what Qualcomm promised and 20% is what we got compared to the average of Snapdragon 8 Elite phones that we’ve tested and a smaller 7% increase over the Dimensity 9400 average. It does beat the Apple A19 Pro too, though AnTuTu results are not comparable cross-platform.
The next test is 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme, which focuses on the GPU. Here again we see a 20% performance uplift over the old Elite chip, which is close enough to the official number. Also, the chip’s lead over the Dimensity 9400 looks better with 14% improvement. The 9500 was recently announced, of course, but we haven’t tested it yet.
Ray tracing is the big new thing in desktop graphics – however, it’s so computationally expensive that only the top GPUs can pull it off at good frame rates. Smartphone GPUs are building out their ray tracing acceleration hardware too – the Gen 5 is supposed to be 25% faster than its predecessor, according to Qualcomm’s numbers.
And that is bang on the improvement that we saw in the Solar Bay test, which is focused on ray tracing. Compared to the Dimensity 9400, the new Snapdragon is 16% ahead. Apple worked on hardware ray tracing support for the A19 Pro as well, but it needs to do more as Qualcomm’s top chip is a solid 27% ahead, according to this test.
So far, so good. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is living up to expectations, at least as it functions in this prototype device. The Adreno GPU continues to be a highlight of Qualcomm’s chipsets and the in-house CPU cores (now in their third generation) measure up well against the competition.
There are certain things that we can’t test with this prototype device – e.g. battery life and sustained performance, which are strongly dependent on the hardware of each phone. Some makers use bigger vapor chambers and batteries than others, it’s as simple as that. So, we’ll have to wait for the first Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones to arrive at the office and then we can proceed with further tests.
