Qualcomm recently unveiled its slightly cheaper Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip for upper mid-range Android flagships. This is set to debut globally on the OnePlus 15R, which is launching on December 17th. Qualcomm says the chip gets an Adreno 840 GPU to handle all your graphics needs. This is the same GPU that’s part of the more expensive Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC . However, the latest Geekbench listing of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 GPU tells a slightly different story about the chip and, more importantly, how it differs from the 8 Elite Gen 5’s GPU.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 5’s Geekbench listing reveals Adreno 829 GPU
The metadata from the Geekbench listing of an alleged Moto X70 Ultra reveals an Adreno 829 GPU. Not just this, Geekbench listing of the alleged Vivo S50 Pro Mini and the alleged OnePlus Ace 6T (China variant of the global OnePlus 15R) with the same chip shows the Adreno 829 GPU. This is interesting considering Qualcomm advertises that the chip features the Adreno 840 GPU, as said above.
Adreno 829 GPU could be Qualcomm’s internal hardware identifier for this generation. The San Diego-based tech giant usually markets multiple GPU bins under one name. The public branding apparently doesn’t always reflect the actual silicon configuration. The Adreno 829 GPU represents the real GPU, while the Adreno 840 GPU groups the non-Elite and Elite versions for better clarity.
Same marketing name, but a difference in performance
The Geekbench listing shows only a 384MHz base GPU frequency, with an OpenCL score of around 12,528. In comparison, if we look at Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones, both 384MHz and 768MHz are present. The latter is the boost frequency, which is missing from the non-Elite chip. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 also reportedly achieves a much higher Vulkan score of 27,318, suggesting a powerful GPU throughput despite the same Adreno 840 GPU name.
The non-Elite Adreno GPU also lacks the High-Performance Memory, which is 18MB of dedicated memory that helps increase bandwidth and decrease latency. We’ll know the real-world results when the first phone with the chip is out.
