Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones: benchmarks, gaming & which to buy

What the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is

The 2025 successor to the 8 Elite and the fastest phone chipset in our catalog: #1 of 79, AnTuTu around 3.95 million, Geekbench 6 near 3,600 single-core and 11,000 multi-core. The second-generation Oryon CPU drops little cores entirely (2 large + 6 medium), which is where the multi-core number comes from. Benchmark details and population ranks are on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 page.

Performance and gaming

Our gaming scale tops out at 99/100 for this chip — every current title at maximum settings with headroom to spare, and it is the platform reviewers use to demo next-year games. The gap to the 2024 8 Elite is real (roughly 25% AnTuTu) but invisible in anything except heavy 3D and AI workloads. Efficiency is the quiet improvement: 2025 flagships on this chip pair the performance with larger batteries and hold sustained frame rates better than the first Oryon generation.

Phones that ship with it

Buying advice

This is the buy-new-and-keep generation: depreciation is minimal, and used examples of the Galaxy S26 or the OnePlus 15 save relatively little against retail. If you are shopping used, the honest question is whether you need #1 at all — the 2024 Snapdragon 8 Elite handles every current game identically for hundreds less, and our OnePlus 15 review shows what the cheaper route still buys. Buy Gen 5 if you keep phones 5+ years, shoot heavy video, or simply want the ceiling.