Snapdragon 8 Elite vs. MediaTek 9400 benchmark showdown
The flagship chipsets for 2025 have arrived - the Snapdragon 8 Elite by Qualcomm and the Dimensity 9400 from MediaTek. Even though most phones running on these chips will see daylight in 2025, we have two phones employing the most powerful SoCs - the Realme GT7 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the vivo X200 Pro with the Dimensity 9400.
Historically, Qualcomm's chips have outperformed MediaTek's, but lately the Taiwanese company is catching up. The latest Dimensity runs an octa-core CPU with 1x 3.63 GHz Cortex-X925 & 3x 3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 4x 2.4 GHz Cortex-A720 cores and uses an Immortalis-G925 GPU.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite, on the other hand, boasts in-house-designed Oryon cores - 2x 4.20 GHz Oryon V2 Phoenix L + 6x 3.53 GHz Oryon V2 Phoenix M. These are significantly different CPU clusters compared to the Dimensity and are clocked higher, too. The Adreno 830 GPU also gets some attention and promises a considerable leap over the last generation.
But how do these two chips stack against each other in terms of performance? Here are the benchmarks
As expected, the Snapdragon 8 Elite shows greater CPU performance in both single-core and multi-core workloads. In Geekbench 6, the SD8 Elite outperforms the Dimensity 9400 by 10% in the multi-core scenario and by 15% in the single-threaded scenario.
In combined workloads like AnTuTu 10, though, the Dimensity 9400 edges Qualcomm's silicon by 6%. we have to point out that for all practical intents and purposes, these kind of differences performance make little difference.
In the GPU-heavy 3DMark benchmarks, the Dimensity 9400 edges out the SD8 Elite by 7-8%, depending on the benchmark, which in this case are the Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay.
It's quite a surprise to see the Immortalis GPU beating the Adreno, even by a small margin.
Keep in mind that these are results from pre-market units, so once we get more phones running these SoCs, we might see a change in ranking. Still, we doubt we will see drastic disparities.
Either way, we see this as an absolute win because now users can rest assured that if they choose a Dimensity 9400-powered smartphone, they won't be sacrificing raw performance. Both chipsets are powerful enough to run anything you throw at them.