Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Review: I Finally Don

We saw the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 unveiled at the company’s tech summit in Hawaii just last October, and it packs some upgraded specs and a large focus on AI going forward. With that, though, there are some big improvements in computational capabilities, with a focus on CPU and GPU improvements that did manage to impress me. Weirdly enough, though, this is the first year in a long time that the predecessor still feels like enough performance for basically anyone.

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About this review: I reviewed the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro. I enabled X-Mode to remove any software limitations that may be present and I ran all tests without using the AeroActive X Cooler to simulate real device usage. Asus nor Qualcomm had any input into the contents of this review.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: Specifications

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 benchmarks overview

• Geekbench: A CPU-centric test that uses several computational workloads, including encryption, compression (text and images), rendering, physics simulations, computer vision, ray tracing, speech recognition, and convolutional neural network inference on images. The score breakdown gives specific metrics. The final score is weighted according to the designer’s considerations, placing a large emphasis on integer performance (65%), then float performance (30%), and finally, cryptography (5%). We used both Geekbench 5 and Geekbench 6 for these tests.
• 3DMark: This is a cross-platform benchmarking tool that is utilized to compare the performance of any device in relation to the others. While mainly focused on evaluating the 3D graphics rendering performance, it can be used to compare the performance of several devices with each other under compute workloads. For testing the 3D graphics rendering performance, there are many tests to do so in 3DMark. However, the most popular tests in this category are the WildLife and WildLife Extreme tests.
• CPU Throttling Test: This app repeats a simple multithreaded test in C for as short as 15 minutes, though we ran it for 30 minutes. The app charts the score over time so you can see when the phone starts throttling. The score is measured in GIPS — or a billion operations per second.
• Burnout Benchmark: Loads different SoC components with heavy workloads to analyze their power consumption, thermal throttling, and maximum performance. It uses Android’s BatteryManager API to calculate the watts used during testing, which can be used to understand the battery drain on a smartphone.

Power efficiency

A huge amount of power drawn

Burnout Benchmark allows us to easily measure the power consumed by a chipset in a smartphone. The following tests are run on different components of the SoC as part of the Burnout Benchmark.

• GPU: Parallel vision-based computations using OpenCL
• CPU: Multi-threaded computations largely involving Arm Neon instructions
• NPU: AI models with typical machine learning ops

First and foremost, here are the power metrics that we collected.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 consumes a lot of power when under load, but that’s not necessarily the full picture. If it draws more power but also gives better results, then that’s still a good sign.

Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a powerful performer that manages to surpass the capabilities of the last generation significantly when it comes to CPU performance. We’ll see this later on as well as we delve into more tests, but Qualcomm has managed to make a particularly powerful chipset this time around.

Observing the above table, you’ll find that the CPU jump when compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is extraordinarily large. However, this roughly adds up to what we expect. Qualcomm touted 30% improvements to CPU performance and 25% improvements to GPU performance, so this is more or less within that ballpark.

The highest increased wattage checks out when compared to the CPU and GPU gains, and because the last steps on a frequency curve are the most expensive in energy consumption, it’s expected that this will result in better efficiency at lower clock speeds.

Computational workload

Big jumps in performance

As expected, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scores better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and by a significant margin. We’re seeing large leaps across the board in CPU performance, and what’s even more astonishing is that these results are actually a little lower than what Qualcomm shared at this year’s tech summit. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 one can expect roughly 25% better CPU performance, according to Geekbench, in multithreaded use cases.

Graphics

Another win for Adreno

The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro here manages a peak score of 5210 in 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme stress test, a fantastic scoreline. For reference, last generation would be more likely to sit around the 3700 mark in terms of scoring, which the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 here handily surpasses.

CPU Throttling Test

Long-term performance

CPU Throttling Test is a test that can show the performance over time of an SoC in a phone in computation, but it’s greatly reliant on the cooling capabilities of the device that it’s in. The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro is clearly capable of keeping this SoC cool enough to run at a very high speed for the duration of the test, but there’s no guarantee other devices will be able to as well. The phone got very hot to the touch, and competing OEMs may look to stave off that heat quicker.

For devices from OnePlus and Samsung that have this chip, like the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and the OnePlus 12, we recommend putting on the “light” battery mode option. This tends to cut the last few jumps off the frequency table and results in much-improved battery life at little to no cost to performance. That will likely help a lot here.

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The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a great iteration with some big CPU gains

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 makes some massive CPU gains across the board, especially in a phone designed to make the most of it. The results in Geekbench actually scored below Qualcomm’s reference device a tad though, so I suspect that the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro isn’t necessarily getting any kind of crazy performance out of it that you wouldn’t get on another device. When we tested the Dimensity 9000+ in the Asus ROG Phone 6D Ultimate, they had overclocked the middle cores, but there isn’t any crazy like that going on here.

What’s especially interesting though is that I don’t feel any compelling need to upgrade this year to a phone with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Z Fold 5 is my daily driver and is one of the best phones around, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 doesn’t really bring much else to the table that you can’t get already. If you’re pushing this SoC to its limits, it can be significantly faster, but it will drain more power and be less efficient than its predecessor, plus I doubt most people are doing that. Therefore, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 makes a lot of sense for most people.

If you want the best of the best, then the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is still probably one of the ones to go for. It powers devices from the likes of Samsung and OnePlus, and those are some of the best smartphones around these days.