I tried gaming on Snapdragon’s biggest rival

when i Benchmarking MediaTek Dimensity 9400 Inside the new processor OPPO Find X8 Pro. While it may not be at the top of the list, it’s certainly no slouch, and our stress test results showed it has plenty of thermal headroom, making it a great choice for those long gaming sessions. But can it keep up with the mighty Snapdragon in real-world gaming? I grabbed the new flagship and some of the most popular Android games to see how the phone performs in the real world.

I have high performance ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro The gaming phone comes with a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor that works with Google Pixel 8 Pro — Has quite a few mid-range GPU implementations. I’ve also included the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor as an example of last-generation performance. However, before we discuss the results, let’s take a look at some benchmarks to see what we can expect from the results.

With its custom Phoenix-L and -M instead of Arm Cortex CPU cores, Snapdragon 8 Elite Significant advantage in Geekbench 6. Our 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay tests are more convincing. Both the chipset and the phone offer nearly identical peak scores, indicating similar frame rates. However, the Dimensity 9400 passed the stress test with reasonable sustained performance over about 9 or 10 runs and fairly low temperatures. To beat it, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite has to run hotter, but will that difference show up in real-world gaming? let’s jump in

Dimensity 9400 vs Snapdragon 8 Elite gaming performance

We’ll start with a few popular FPS games: COD Mobile, to see if the phone can sustain the demanding 120fps frame rate; and PUBG Mobile, which meets HDR graphics and 4x AA requirements at 60fps. Neither of these aging games would be considered the pinnacle of action graphics, but their play styles require high and consistent frame rates.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 achieves solid frame rates here. While it’s not as strictly locked at 120fps as the Snapdragon 8 Elite in COD Mobile, it’s above 117fps most of the time, and you’re unlikely to notice the rare dip I saw in two rounds to still be healthy 112fps. But because we’re being picky, this result isn’t quite as smooth as the previous generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which had slightly better top 90% and lowest framerate results in this game.

In PUBG Mobile, the roles are slightly reversed, with the OPPO Find X8 Pro and its MediaTek chip being more consistent than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in terms of minimum specs. Still, while it’s not as tightly locked to 60 fps as the 8 Elite, you’d be hard-pressed to notice or feel an average difference of less than 1 fps. Obviously, these two games do not have high requirements for flagship chips. We should note that the minimum FPS is slightly improved compared to last year’s Google Pixel 8 Pro, suggesting that the presence of these higher-performance chips brings marginal benefits, at least for serious gamers.

Next, we turn to Genshin Impact. Despite being four years old, its open-world landscape remains one of the more graphically demanding landscapes in the mobile gaming space, especially when running the game at its 60 fps target. The Dimensity 9400 meets this goal to a large extent, with 90% of frames exceeding 59 fps, and the lowest frame rate actually being better than the latest ROG. Likewise, the phone offers better bottom-line performance than the previous-generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so when it rarely dips, it’s not as noticeable.

However, the Snapdragon 8 Elite was again slightly more restrictive at 60fps, although both phones struggled in this regard. While the MediaTek chip often exhibits odd stutters and dropped frames, they’re under 22 milliseconds so shouldn’t be noticeable. In fact, our 8 Elite showed more noticeable stuttering at the end of our five-minute test, but that seems to be an anomaly.

Finally, we use the fast-paced FZero GX for simulator testing. While the menus still seem laggy on every phone I’ve tested, the Dimensity 9400 handles these parts slightly more smoothly than the 8 Elite. The OPPO Find X8 Pro and its MediaTek chip also matched or even surpassed Qualcomm’s best in average and 10th percentile frames, surpassing the previous generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. However, as we’ve seen before, Arm’s Mali architecture performs very well here, allowing even the weaker Pixel 8 Pro to maintain solid frame rates in games. Speaking of which, the MediaTek chip appears a bit wonky, frequently experiencing small dips below 60fps, while Asus’ gaming phone locks it in at a more or less consistent value. Despite this, there were very few stutters detected on both phones, and playback felt very smooth on both phones.

Based on these four in-game tests, the performance of the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite are almost indistinguishable. Their baseline similarities translate equally well into real-world gaming, making both an excellent choice for those looking to ensure rock-solid framerates today and into the foreseeable future. This is also a solid result Arm Immortal G925it was previously (perhaps unfairly) considered a slower GPU than the Qualcomm Adreno.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite may have a slight fps advantage in some situations and seems to stick more strictly to 60fps, but it’s not enough to give it the win here. The biggest caveat is the 8 Elite’s stress test temperature results and our Implementation experience of more popular Snapdragon phones Better than the Asus ROG Phone 9 which has good cooling.

While the actual game doesn’t get that hot, at least not during the 20 minutes or so I played it, the higher temperatures mean there may be more aggressive effects if playing for longer periods of time, charging while playing, or just living The Throat is in a much warmer country than dank old Blighty. There’s also future games to consider, which will ultimately put more stress on the phone’s hardware and cause temperatures to rise. In a few years, the 8 Elite may not be able to handle gaming very well. I have no such concerns with the Dimensity 9400, at least not in the implementation I tested in the OPPO Find X8 Pro. We also benchmarked the vivo X200 Pro, and it ran hotter, but not quite to the heat we’ve seen on some 8 Elite phones.

Of course, there’s also availability. Most flagship phones powered by MediaTek, such as the OPPO Find X8 Pro and vivo X200 Pro, are not available in the United States. I certainly wouldn’t go through the hassle and carrier hassle of importing one, especially since the Taiwanese chipset has no clear performance advantage. Still, gamers shouldn’t hesitate to buy one if these phones are available in your country.