Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset brings some incredible improvements that will undoubtedly make the gaming experience on next-generation flagship smartphones unlike anything that we've experienced before.
Much of it has been derived from the architecture improvements that Qualcomm has made to the new chipset, which includes the company's first-ever Adreno GPU with a sliced architecture, which has specifically been designed with mobile gamers in mind.
Snapdragon 8 Elite takes mobile gaming to the next level
The GPU features independent shader processor based cores for better work distribution, allowing for higher clock speeds, higher frame rates, sharper images, and improved gameplay as well as rendering of complex scenes.
Qualcomm also points out that with 12MB of data being able to be stored on the GPU alone, less graphical data is now sent to the DDR memory, which allows for longer sustained gameplay sessions and smoother gameplay. A significant improvement in ray tracing benchmark performance has also been achieved.
In addition to support for Unreal's Chaos physics system, there's full support for Unreal Engine's Nanite, a mobile-first only on Snapdragon, which allows for a significant increase in geometric complexity, enabling film-quality 3D environments in mobile games that are rendered directly on device. This will also support the arrival of mobile CPU-intensive multiplayer games.
As far as performance figures go, Qualcomm claims an impressive 40% improvement in Adreno GPU performance as well as 40% greater power efficiency. The key advancement here is not just the considerable improvement in performance but also the chipset's capability to allow for longer gaming sessions courtesy of its overall improved power efficiency.
It will certainly be interesting to see how all of this pans out in terms of real world performance once we actually get devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite in our hands. Fortunately, it's not going to be a long wait, as Samsung is confirmed to be launching Snapdragon 8 Elite devices in the near future.
Disclaimer: Qualcomm is hosting a large group of international media for the Snapdragon Summit 2024 from October 21-23 in Hawaii, including SamMobile. All opinions and analyses remain our own with Qualcomm receiving no advance preview or exercising any control over our coverage.
