We tested the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1: benchmark results

So, Qualcomm just announced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 — a slightly upgraded version of the flagship 8 Gen 1.

At first look — it "only" offers a 200 MHz bump in peak performance, which is pretty easy to scoff at. But Qualcomm cited huge improvements in efficiency, which is where the Plus' power is really at.

In any case, Asus were extremely kind and sent us an actual ROG testing platform loaded with a brand-new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 to test. Please note — this device does not represent an actual product, it's just a phone built to experiment with the hardware.

We ran the prototype through the same ringer we put any other device through — our regular set of benchmarks. So, we can compare its results to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that we have inside the Galaxy S22 Ultra.

Interesting test results. We started off kind of confused by the GFXBench Car Chase test — both processors seemed to be on par, and in the final scoring, the non-Plus was actually ahead by 2 frames. OK. Once we got to the heavier Manhattan test, the gains from the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 started to become more apparent. This trend continued into the Geekbench test, where we can see the improvement translate as expected.

The most interesting results always come from 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme stress test. Now, that's a heavy benchmark and its goal isn't to show us which phone can play it smoothly. No, no, it's specifically designed to torture the device through 20 loops of a very heavy graphical environment.

And the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 not only slightly outperformed the non-Plus, it also took quite a while for it to throttle (all the way up to loop 16).

Now, this test isn't completely fair — the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is placed in a retail Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra here, and obviously, Samsung has tuned its phones to run cool and conserve battery. While the testing platform with the 8+ Gen 1 was made to push the processor. However, the test does show us what is potentially possible with the new chip.

Of course, you are probably wondering how these benchmarks translate to, you know... actually using the device. Now, I couldn't resist the urge of putting the new Apex Legends Mobile game on this test device. And yeah, it was quite impressive.

The game settings will only allow you to go as high as ExtremeHD settings if you want 60 FPS. I flipped this on, then activated anti-aliasing and bloom and just jumped in. I would say the performance was extremely smooth — the only hiccups happened when the game was loading in textures while jumping in the map or while zooming in with a large scope — I would say those are down to game optimization. Apex Mobile is still quite fresh.

And yes, the phone did get warm, though not exactly hot. Still, if I was going to be pushing the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 to its limits on a daily basis, I'd look for a device that has a cooling accessory, or a very well-developed internal cooling system.

As for battery life, I was really impressed how well it held up both while torturing it with benchmarks and while headshotting my way through the battle arena.