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Why is PC Pro devoting three pages to a gaming phone? The answer lies within: this is the debut for Qualcomm’s most powerful silicon yet, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Qualcomm claims a trio of benefits: a 25% boost in performance in daily tasks, 30% for games and a 45% improvement in power efficiency. It even supports Wi-Fi 7.
It remains an eight-core chip, but where before the prime core (now the Cortex-X3) was accompanied by three performance cores and four efficiency cores, this year there are four performance cores and three geared for efficiency. They’re all clocked faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips but share the same frequency as the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 platform released in mid-2022.
The Adreno GPU has also enjoyed an upgrade (the 740 versus the 730). Along with support for Vulkan 1.3, it now provides real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing in games that offer it. So not only will games run more quickly – particularly handy for gaming phones
