Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s AAA Gaming Emulation Opens Up A Bright Future, But A Near 50W Power Draw Needs Qualcomm’s Attention [Update]

Update: It turns out that the application that emulates PC games, GameHub, was reporting a faulty reading that doubled the displayed wattage. While playing Resident Evil Requiem, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was consuming 24.1W peak power, not 48.3W.

The absence of native AAA games on the Android platform isn’t a weakness for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, as Qualcomm has equipped it with sufficient processing juice where it can effortlessly run those visually attractive titles at higher framerates. Unfortunately, in pursuit of making the SoC capable enough in this regard, the San Diego firm has lost sight of power efficiency, which is why the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 reaches nearly 50W in certain titles, making it a severe flaw that needs immediate rectification when the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro arrive.

Demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Resident Evil Requiem all run flawlessly on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but at the expense of extreme power draw and heat

A Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 paired with 24GB RAM and a robust cooling solution will always go a long way to guarantee higher framerates in the most demanding of AAA games, with the REDMAGIC 11 Pro Golden Saga offering these specifications at a steep price of €1,499.00, or $1,726.92. The YouTube channel ETA PRIME obtained this flagship sample and immediately began testing some games using emulation software.

While you can check out the entire video below, demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Resident Evil Requiem all ran buttery smooth, with Capcom’s newest survival-horror entrant reaching between 80-90FPS. These are impressive results, but you may have also noticed that achieving this performance comes at a major cost of extreme power draw, which is almost 50W.

When running Resident Evil Requiem, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 peaks at 48.3W, which is more than double the 20W power draw of Apple’s M5 when the latter was running Cyberpunk 2077 in the updated MacBook Pro. Even with the REDMAGIC 11 Pro Golden Saga’s liquid and vapor chamber cooling, dissipating near 50W of heat from a 7-inch chassis is an impossible task, and it falls upon Qualcomm to address these dangerous metrics.

The company is planning to use Samsung’s Heat Pass Technology on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro to tackle higher temperatures, but Qualcomm isn’t going after the real problem, which is efficiency. Instead, it only appears to solve a symptom of that problem, which is heat. We’ve already discussed that the chipset manufacturer is setting a harmful trend, leaving the power draw of its SoCs unchecked, and this attitude can lead to severe consequences.

News Source: ETA PRIME

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