We benchmark the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

We have our very first Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered smartphone in for review, and we are eager to show you the performance jump the new hardware platform offers. While we cannot talk specifics about this particular smartphone just yet, nobody stops us from going through the benchmark scores it can output.

Below, you will see the best scores we've gotten from several of the top hardware platforms across all our reviews.

The average numbers (not listed there for brevity) are a bit lower, so keep that in mind. These numbers are best-case scenarios. We didn't include the averages because we had only two (best) points of reference for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, too - one provided by Qualcomm as a reference score and another we captured ourselves using this review unit.

Along the regular SM8550-AB model of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 below, you will also see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SM8550-AC, which is the overclocked version that ships in some devices that you can see here.

We start with the CPU-intensive Geekbench test. As per Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 should be 30% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. We weren't able to reach Qualcomm's official numbers, unfortunately.

The jump in performance that we observed was nevertheless a healthy 22-23% in multi-core. The single core performance difference was less than stellar at about 7-8%.

Next, GPU tests. Here, Qualcomm claims the new Adreno 750 GPU is 25% faster than the Adreno 740 inside the SD 8 Gen 2. Plus, it is also more power-efficient and should offer 40% better raytracing.

In our offscreen testing, the new GPU was 16% better than the one in the non-overclocked SD 8 Gen 2 in the 1440p OpenGL ES 3.1 test, 13% better in the Vulkan test, and almost 22% better in the 1080p OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics benchmark.

We also got around 15% improvement compared to the non-overclocked SD 8 Gen 2 in the 1440p 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme test, which runs offscreen again.

In the 3D Mark Solar Bay test, which is a ray tracing benchmark, we saw a whopping 43.5% improvement in performance from our Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 device.

Finally, who doesn't love a good AnTuTu comparison chart? This compound benchmark takes into account many aspects of the devices, including storage, RAM, display resolution, etc so it's not a great tool for comparing platforms. It's much better to compare specific devices.

In this test, our mystery review phone, which uses the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, occupied the #1 spot in our all-time review chart. Nice!

So overall, it's a great showing from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. We are looking at up to 22% net performance improvement in CPU and GPU performance compared to the best Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices we've ever tested.

And it's worth noting our test phone didn’t get excessively hot during benchmarking, just warm, which is another promising thing for the new chipset.

While the SD 8 Gen 1 model had unimpressive sustained performance and stability, the SD 8 Gen 2 improved this aspect, and it seems the SD 8 Gen 3 could be doing even better.

We will have even more information for you next week after our stress tests are over and we are finally allowed to reveal the identity of this test device with a full review.

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