You won’t have to wait too long before the Android diehards will be holding aloft their top-of-the-line Android phones and comparing them to Apple’s latest iPhone 17 Pro. Already, OnePlus promises we’ll have the OnePlus 15 (yes, we’re skipping over the 14) in hand soon enough. Overseas, Xiaomi has a wild-as-hell smartphone, the 17 Pro, with a screen on the camera bump. Both devices are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip announced last week. Samsung will likely unveil a new Galaxy phone with the chip early next year. Lucky for you, I have a small inkling of what users can expect if you’re planning to buy the latest and greatest Android phone.
In my tests using a Qualcomm-supplied dummy phone packed with a 6.8-inch AMOLED display, 24GB of RAM, and a 4,300mAh battery, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 performed more than admirably. In Geekbench 6 CPU tests, the phone scored 3,830 in single-core and 12,224 in multi-core settings. That’s more than 700 points higher in single-core and an eye-popping 2,400 points higher in multi-core than the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with its last-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.
If I were to compare that to an iPhone 17 Pro and its A19 Pro silicon, they’re neck and neck in single-core tests, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 trounced Apple’s latest in multi-core by 2,438 points. Here we come to graphics performance (as a note, the iPhone 17 Pro scores around the same as the 17 Pro Max in 3DMark save for Solar Bay Extreme benchmarks, which push the phones on ray tracing performance). The Steel Nomad Light test propped up Qualcomm’s claims with a score of 3,180, equivalent to around 23 average frames per second. An iPhone 17 Pro scored 2,331 in our own Steel Nomad Light tests.
It was at this point that I started running into problems where the test phone started to overheat and throttle performance. I normally run benchmarks three times to achieve the best result and compare averages, but it seems the device wasn’t in the mood to game for very long. In 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test, the phone hit 7,396 points, or about 44 fps. That’s less than Qualcomm’s claimed 50 fps in the same room temperature conditions. Performance sagged at the expected rate when the phone kept getting hotter and hotter. Phone makers themselves will have to dictate how well their phones perform after sustained periods with better thermal control.
Let’s take a moment to catch our breath. This isn’t an apples-to-apples test. The iPhone 17 Pro has 12GB of RAM, the same as the Galaxy S25 Ultra. I truly doubt we’ll see a phone with 24GB of RAM anytime in the near future. Synthetic benchmarks never ever tell the whole story. Google’s Pixel series, powered by its own Tensor chips, normally ranks far below anything put out by Apple or Samsung, and the Pixel 10 Pro is still perfectly serviceable as a daily driver phone.
Performance will matter more if you’re trying to eke out better frame rates in mobile gaming or if you plan to somehow turn your phone into a mobile video editing suite. Qualcomm claims its chip will allow for full support for the Advanced Professional Video codec, which is used by professionals for high-quality video recording. Again, it will be up to Samsung and the other phone makers to take advantage of this.