Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Benchmark Score Hints at Big Improvement in Graphics Performance

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is expected to be unveiled by the chipmaker at its upcoming Snapdragon Summit 2023 event next month. The company has not yet revealed any details of the anticipated successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC that was unveiled last year, but several leaks related to its performance have surfaced online in recent months. Now, a benchmark of the purported chipset has surfaced online, giving us an idea of what to expect from the next flagship mobile processor from Qualcomm.

A listing for the purported Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (via tipster Ice Universe) was posted to the benchmarking site Geekbench on Monday. The listing is titled Qualcomm Pineapple for arm64 and refers to the same codename for the chipset that is expected to debut as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 next month. Qualcomm is yet to confirm the name of its next smartphone chip.

According to the entry, the Geekbench 6 Vulkan score for the chip is 15,434 points in the Vulkan test. This is much higher than the score for two gaming smartphones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that were released last year. The most recent entry for the Nubia Z50S Pro indicates a score of 10,125 points, while the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate scored 9,101 points.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC that powered most flagship smartphones in 2023 is equipped with an Adreno 740 GPU, and the next-generation chipset is expected to feature an Adreno 750 GPU. The Geekbench scores indicate that the graphics performance on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC will be around 50 percent higher than its predecessor.

Back in June, an AnTuTu benchmark listing for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was spotted on the Chinese microblogging website Weibo, with a score of 17,71,106 points. The score was much higher than all the top-ranking devices at the time, including the iQoo Neo 8 Pro (13,58,352), OnePlus 11 5G (13,24,440), and Oppo Find X6 Pro (13,07,816). 

However, it is worth taking these scores with a pinch of salt as smartphones launched with the upcoming chipset could offer varying levels of performance based on their build quality, thermal management technology, and software optimisation. We can expect to learn more about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset in the days leading to its debut at the Snapdragon Summit 2023 event in October.