Qualcomm recently unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, which will be first seen on the OnePlus Ace 6T debuting on Dec. 3 in China and the OnePlus 15R launching globally on Dec. 17. The same chip is also officially confirmed to power the Vivo S50 Pro Mini launching this month in China.
Officially, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is advertised to feature the Adreno 840 GPU, which is also available on the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. However, recent Geekbench findings of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 tell more information about its chipset and how it differs from the 8 Elite’s GPU.
Geekbench listings reveal Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 has Adreno 829 GPU
The metadata of the above Geekbench listing reveals that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5-powered Vivo S50 Pro Mini (model number V2527A) features the Adreno 829 GPU, instead of the Adreno 840. Not only this, but the alleged Moto X70 Ultra / Edge 70 Ultra (XT2603) and OnePlus Ace 6T (PLR110) with Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 have also been found to be equipped with the Adreno 829 through Geekbench metadata.
While Qualcomm advertises the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5’s GPU as Adreno 840, the Geekbench listing shows that Adreno 829 is Qualcomm’s internal hardware identifier for this generation. Qualcomm often markets multiple GPU bins under one name, so the public branding doesn’t always reflect the actual silicon configuration.
The internal ID (Adreno 829) represents the real GPU block, while the “Adreno 840” branding groups the standard and Elite versions together for marketing clarity. This lets Qualcomm use the same label even when the chips have different voltage, thermal, and clock limits.
Same name, different performance
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 in devices like the Vivo S50 Pro Mini, OnePlus Ace 6T (PLR110), and Moto X70 Ultra (XT2603) shows only a 384 MHz base GPU frequency, and its Geekbench OpenCL score is around 12,528, signalling a lower-binned configuration.
In contrast, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 inside the OnePlus 15 (PLK110) exposes both 384 MHz (base) and 768 MHz (boost) GPU states, and achieves a much higher Vulkan score of 27,318, more than twice the performance of the standard Gen 5. This confirms that the Elite variant delivers significantly stronger GPU throughput despite sharing the same “Adreno 840” marketing name.
A key architectural factor behind the performance gap is Qualcomm’s decision to ship the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 with the same sliced Adreno 840 GPU and Frame Motion Engine 3.0 found on the Elite model, but without the Adreno High-Performance Memory (HPM) subsystem. HPM is a high-bandwidth, low-latency memory path that allows the GPU to sustain higher frequencies and feed shader workloads more efficiently. Its absence means the standard Adreno 840 in the 8 Gen 5 operates with reduced memory throughput. This is the main reason for the huge GPU performance gap between the GPUs of both chipsets.
