Snapdragon 8 Elite vs Dimensity 9400 Performance & Gaming Tested ft. Realme GT 7 Pro

So this Android Authority article has been creating a lot of commotion in the tech community recently. Well, according to the article, the Snapdragon 888 inside the realme GT 7 Pro is a hot mess right now. Now, of course, this got me curious. Is it really that bad? Well, now that the performance testing embargo for the GT 7 Pro has lifted, I did some sleuthing of my own and decided to do some extensive benchmarking and gaming on the phone. Of course, I've also compared it against the Dimensity 9400 inside the Vivo X200 Pro. All right, so let's find out whether these are a hot mess or if they're all right. If you're here for the first time, I'm Aishat, you're watching Trakin Tech English, your destination for detailed, incisive gadget reviews. Now, I'm not going into the depths of the architecture of the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Dimensity 9400. It's there on your screen right now. If you want to see it in detail, just pause it. Of course, from this, you can tell that the Snapdragon 8 Elite has a faster CPU compared to the Dimensity 9400. Now that that's out of the way, before I talk about the synthetic benchmarks, let me tell you a couple of things. First thing is that when we ran the benchmarks, the Realme GT 7 Pro was in GT mode and the boost mode was switched on for the Vivo X200 Pro. And both these phones have also been upgraded to their latest firmware. All right, so starting with Geekbench, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is definitely beating the Dimensity 9400 in both single core and multi-core scores. In fact, the multi-core score is nearly touching 10,000 points, which is crazy. But wait for it, there is a twist to that tale. And before I talk about that twist, let me talk about the Antutu score first. So the best score I managed to achieve in Antutu with the Realme GT 7 Pro is about 2.83 million. So these scores that are floating around of Snapdragon 8 Elite going up to 3 billion, yeah, that's not happened till now, at least for us. But the Antutu score is definitely higher than that of the Dimensity 9400. Now let me reveal the twist. When I started the test, the phone was at 6 degrees Celsius. The same is true for Geekbench, because when I got the multi-core score of 9785, the phone was about 16, 17 degrees. Now in normal ambient room temperatures, the multi-core score drops down to below 9,000 points, which is still higher than the Dimensity 9400, but you see where I'm getting at, right? So if you're running in ambient room temperatures in a country like India, you're not gonna get the, you know, absolute best performance on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, that's for sure. Now talking about the storage scores, they're nearly identical, but the Realme GT 7 Pro has slightly higher read and write speeds. Now to see how the CPUs perform during a sustained load, we actually run like a 40-thread, 30-minute run on CPU throttle, and in that, the Realme GT 7 Pro with Snapdragon 8 Elite actually offered better stability compared to the Dimensity 9400 inside the X200 Pro. Alright, next, I'm definitely gonna be talking about gaming, but if you haven't already supported us by hitting that subscribe button, go ahead and do it right now. We'll take all of your support because we need to hit a million soon. Alright, now it's time to talk about the GPU and the Arduino 830 that you get with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Immortalist G925 that you get with the Dimensity 9400 have improved ray tracing capabilities now. So which is why I ran the Solar Bay test and what I noticed is that the Dimensity 9400 clocks higher average FPS, but the frame rates are higher on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Although when I stress tested the GPU in 3DMark Wildlife stress test, we got an average stability of 66.1% on Realme and just 49.3% on Dimensity. In fact, you get higher frame rates on Snapdragon compared to MediaTek. But if you notice closely, the X200 Pro didn't get as hot as the Realme GT 7 Pro because there seems to be an artificial cap of 44 degrees. That's not it, Vivo also lost far less battery life compared to Realme. Now we stressed it even further with 3D Mark Wildlife extreme stress test. Again, the 8 Elite doesn't throttle as much as the Dimensity 9400, but it loses more battery life and runs hotter once again. So what I noticed in general during our testing is that Vivo throttles performance to keep the temperatures in check. On the other hand, Realme actually pushes for performance, especially in GT mode, where it doesn't worry about the phone getting hot or even losing more battery life. Finally, let's talk about the real world gaming test. And I played Genshin Impact for 30 minutes at highest graphics and 60 frames per second. And in that test, the Realme GT 7 Pro actually offered higher average frame rates of 59.9 compared to 59.7 on the Vivo X200 Pro. Now you must be wondering, these are tiny differences, but these differences do matter when it comes to Genshin Impact gaming. And especially when you play for longer, then Realme will offer more sustained performance compared to Vivo. But the good thing is that both these phones do not get too hot and the temperatures are under 41 degrees. Of course, it's 0.5 degrees lower on Vivo. So keep that in mind. Now I also did get the power draw consumption for both of these chipsets. But the problem is that the 8 Elite's number seems completely off. But what we can glean from this information is the fact that the power draw is definitely lower on the Snapdragon 8 Elite compared to the Dimensity 9400. By the way, the GT 7 Pro also has like extra gaming features. For example, you get game frame interpolation and the game Genshin Impact runs at 120 FPS. And we actually checked it in the tool and it did show 120 FPS. Also, the GT 7 Pro's gaming mode gives you the option to tune the frequency of the CPU and the GPU cores. You can also even bump up the resolution, the game mode is actually very, very detailed. So from all the testing that I did on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, what I can tell is that the 8 Elite is a difficult beast to tame. Since it's very powerful, it can actually get very hot and you know, companies will have to throttle performance or add a very massive vapor cooling chamber to ensure that sustained peak performance at you know, the highest CPU load is possible. So Realme of course struggles with that. But it's not too bad, especially when you consider real world gaming. Now, if you ask me, I have a strong feeling that other phones that are going to launch in the future with Snapdragon 8 Elite might perform better than the Realme GT 7 Pro. I still think that it's not too late, the Realme GT 7 Pro still has enough time for the updates to come in and become better at performance and maybe even take on the you know, Asus and the Red Magics of the world and maybe even iQOO. Also talking about which on a tangential note, I feel that AAA titles right now are lacking on Android. And we really need them to push the performance and stress test gaming even more because even Genshin Impact seems like a little too less now. So what are your thoughts on the Realme GT 7 Pro's performance with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in comparison against the Dimensity 9400 inside the Vivo X200 Pro? Let me know in the comment section below. I'll see you guys in the next one. Until then, keep tracking and stay safe.