At first glance, it offers “only” a 200MHz peak in peak performance, which is quite easy to spot. But Qualcomm cited huge improvements in efficiency, and that’s where the Plus’s strength really lies.
In any case, Asus was extremely nice and sent us a real ROG test platform packed with a brand new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 for testing. Please note that this device does not represent an actual product, it is simply a device built to experiment with the hardware.
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 benchmark results
We ran the prototype through the same ringtone as any other device: our regular set of benchmarks. So we can compare the results with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that we have in the Galaxy S22 Ultra.
| 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 |
Interesting test results. We started out a bit confused by the GFXBench Car Chase test – both processors seemed to match up, and in the final score the non-Plus was actually 2 frames away. OKAY. Once we got to the tougher Manhattan test, the benefits of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 started to become more apparent. This trend continued in 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. That’s a hard benchmark and the goal isn’t to show us which phone can play it smoothly. No, no, it is specially designed to torture the device through 20 loops of a very heavy graphics environment.
And the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 not only slightly outperformed the non-Plus, it also took a long time to throttle (all the way to loop 16).
Now this test isn’t entirely fair – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is being put in a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra here in the shop, and it’s clear that Samsung has tuned its phones to stay cool and save battery. While the test platform with the 8+ Gen 1 is made to push the processor. However, the test shows us what is possible with the new chip.
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in real life
The game settings only allow you to go as high as ExtremeHD settings if you want 60 FPS. I turned this on, then turned on anti-aliasing and bloom and just jumped in. I’d say the execution was extremely smooth – the only hiccups happened when the game was loading in textures while I was jumping the map or while zooming in on a wide range – I’d say those have to do with game optimization . Apex Mobile is still quite fresh.
And yes, the phone got warm, although not really hot. But if I wanted to push the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 to its limits on a daily basis, I would look for a device with a cooling accessory or a very well-developed internal cooling system.
As for battery life, I was really impressed with how well it held up, both while torturing benchmarks and making my way through the battle arena.