Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has been making a lot of noise, with Microsoft claiming that it’s the next big thing for Windows gaming. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s mostly rubbish. AMD’s Phoenix and Hawk Point processors offer vastly superior gaming performance, often beating the Snapdragon X Elite by 2x or more in popular gaming titles. The following testing conducted by “The Phawx” shows that the Arm chip is neither faster nor more power efficient than prevalent x86 CPUs on the market.
AMD Ryzen 7 8840U/Radeon 780M Destroys the SD X Elite in Gaming
In Cyberpunk 2077, the Ryzen 7 8840U averages 54 FPS, up from ~30 FPS on the Snapdragon X Elite. It’s worth noting that the Elite uses the Windows power profiles to adjust its frequency and TDP. Efficiency mode has a TDP of 20-25W, while performance mode sets it to 38W (versus 25W on the 8840U).
Intel’s Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors continue to be an embarrassment, barely edging past the Snapdragon X Elite in Cyberpunk at 25W.
Horizon Zero Dawn is a testament to the efficiency of AMD’s Radeon 780M. Using the default 25W TDP, the Ryzen 7 8840U is 2.6x faster than the X Elite (23W). Even in 10W mode, the RDNA 3 GPU is 2.2x and 1.6x faster than the Snapdragon X Elite running at 23W and 38W, respectively.
Intel’s Core Ultra 155H, on the other hand, falls short of the Elite (23W) at 20W and 25W. No wonder Qualcomm compared its latest chip to Meteor Lake rather than Phoenix/Hawk Point.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is among the more optimized PC games. The AMD Ryzen 7 8840U averages 92 FPS at 720p “Low,” up from a paltry 44.5 FPS on the Snapdragon X Elite. Both SKUs were running at 20W. The Qualcomm chip delivers comparable performance to the 8840U when running in performance mode (35W), with the former set to 10W. Essentially, the Radeon 780M is ~3.5x more efficient than the X Elite in gaming workloads.
Finally, we have “The Callisto Protocol“, where the Ryzen 7 8840U produces an average of 58 FPS and 50 FPS in 20W and 15W modes, respectively. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is roughly half as fast with averages of 29 FPS and 26 FPS at 34W and 24W, respectively.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 8840U (which is technically the same as the 7740U) has been on the market for over a year now, while the X Elite is yet to launch. The latter’s primary rival will be the Ryzen 9 AI 365/Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 which is going to be at least 40-50% faster than the 8840U with its upgraded Radeon “RDNA 3.5” 890M graphics.
