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.
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 benchmark results
| Benchmark | Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (test device) | Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (Galaxy S22 Ultra) |
|---|---|---|
| GFXBench Car Chase on-screen | 83 | 85 |
| GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 on-screen | 139 | 119 |
| Geekbench 5 Single-Core | 1313 | 1242 |
| Geekbench 5 Multi-Core | 4147 | 3538 |
| 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test (Highest) | 2788 | 2551 |
| 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test (Lowest) | 1928 | 1226 |
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.
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in real life
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.
