GoKawiilWith the new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra in our hands, I’ve been itching to see how the phone stacks up against other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 handsets that have been on the market for a few months now. Based on my experience so far, today’s best Android phones are truly overkill for day-to-day tasks and even the most demanding Android games. They might even be powerful enough to bridge the gap between phones and lightweight PCs. Still, Samsung’s latest flagship claims to pack even more power with its souped-up Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy.
Qualcomm notes that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy offers a 19% CPU boost, 24% faster graphics rendering, and a 39% NPU uplift compared to its predecessor. However, that doesn’t tell us how much better, if at all, it is compared to the regular 8 Elite Gen 5, which has been on the market since late 2025.
Clock speeds are slightly higher, but what benefits does this really bring?
A closer look at the spec sheet reveals the biggest Oryon CPU cores peaking at 4.74GHz, up from 4.61GHz on the standard model. That’s a 2.8% increase, but with the smaller cores unchanged at 3.62GHz, this is unlikely to make much meaningful difference to day-to-day applications or even more advanced use cases.
Adreno clock speeds are much harder to uncover. Given Qualcomm cites a 23% generation jump for the standard 8 Elite Gen 5 over its predecessor, it stands to reason that the “for Galaxy” model might just poke its nose out in front here, too. However, last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy was only a few percentage points faster in GPU benchmarks.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy benchmarks For comparison, I’ve grabbed the OnePlus 15 and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Two powerhouse flagships equipped with the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and plenty of memory.
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Starting with a look at the CPU performance scores, it’s essentially all square and within the margin of error of each other. That applies whether looking at single or multi-core workloads. All three phones offer essentially the same performance.
The clock-speed advantage for the Galaxy S26 Ultra doesn’t translate into a real boost here, likely because this is only a temporary value that isn’t sustained long enough to make a difference in Geekbench 6’s varied workloads. In fact, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra comes out on top in multi-core scores by 1.4% — but again, that’s within fine margins and score variation.
Turning to graphics workloads via 3DMark’s Stress Test suite, we see a surprisingly solid advantage for Samsung’s latest flagship, at least in raw performance terms.
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