Last month, we used a Realme GT8 Pro prototype to run early benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The phone was officially unveiled last week and is preparing to launch globally next month, so we are ready to do some proper benchmarking.
Even better, in the meantime we have reviewed several competing flagships, so we can have a better look at the key chipsets for the next twelve months. There are those that run on the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 like the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. Others picked the Dimensity 9500, e.g. the vivo X300 Pro. And there’s the Apple A19 Pro inside the iPhone 17 Pro Max – Apple’s chipsets are no longer out in front, but they are still the usual yardstick against which all others are measured.
We are also including previous generation chips as a baseline to measure the performance improvement.
Let’s start with the generalist test, AnTuTu. We’re in the process of moving over to AnTuTu v11, but we are also including v10 tests for continuity. In v11, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 inside the Realme GT8 Pro is the clear leader – it has a 9% lead over the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. Keep in mind that AnTuTu measures things like memory performance, not just raw compute power, so the same chipset can score differently depending on the surrounding hardware.
The new version of the benchmark gives the Snapdragon chip a similar lead over the Dimensity 9500 inside the Oppo Find X9 Pro, while the older v10 benchmark has the MediaTek chip slightly ahead. For comparison with the previous generation Elite, we have to turn to v10 – here the GT8 Pro beats the GT 7 Pro by around 8%.
Focusing on just the CPU, Geekbench 6 shows the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 losing to the Apple A19 Pro by 6% in the single-core test. That’s a narrow margin and even that disappears in the multi-core test, which is inside the margin of error.
Arm’s new C1-Ultra core inside the Dimensity 9500 lags behind, being 9% slower than the Snapdragon in single-core performance. The same 9% gap is observed in the multi-core test as well. The Dimensity 9500 is closer to the original Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU than the new 8 Elite Gen 5.
Next up is the GPU. When it can run at full tilt, the new Adreno 840 tops the chart with a small margin over the Arm G1-Ultra – well, the Realme GT8 Pro beats the vivo X300 Pro, while the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max falls behind.
Why does the Xiaomi keep losing to the Realme, even though both use the same chipset? We think it has to do with how each company tuned the performance curve for their respective phones.
Before you declare Realme the winner, click on the second tab – the benchmark actually runs several times and reports both the highest and the lowest score. The highest score usually comes when the phone is fresh and cool, the lowest after thermal throttling has set in.
This is where the Realme GT8 Pro disappoints the most – throttling reduces performance by a whopping 67%. The Xiaomi 17 Pro Max also loses some speed, but it’s only by 40%, leaving the Xiaomi well ahead of the Realme. The Apple A19 Pro and Dimensity 9500 show better sustained performance than their 8 Elite Gen 5 competitors. The big surprise is the Oppo Find X8 Ultra with last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, which stays ahead of its newly-launched competition.
We will wrap things up with ray tracing – the most computationally expensive way to render graphics yet. Arm put a lot of work into its second generation hardware accelerator and it shows – there’s a massive uplift from the Dimensity 9400(+). The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is also showing gains, though more moderate ones.
We are working on an in-depth review of the Realme GT8 Pro and we will have more to say about its performance and thermal management – and everything else about the phone too, of course.
