Qualcomm’s sales pitch for the Snapdragon 8 Elite It’s performance, performance, performance. Whether you’re playing games, running the latest AI tasks, or just using the new Oryon processor to power through your favorite apps, the latest Snapdragon promises to be fast. Probably faster than you actually needActually.

However, Qualcomm’s presentation mentioned up to 45% higher power efficiency for its new custom processor configuration, thanks in part to TSMC’s cutting-edge 3nm manufacturing process. It’s the ability to add significant hours of screen time to certain scenarios. To see if these claims have any merit, I grabbed the new ASUS ROG Phone 9 Prowhich is very similar to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-equipped ROG Phone 8, and put the phones through a series of battery tests. The results certainly lend weight to Qualcomm’s lofty claims, albeit with a few caveats.

Snapdragon 8 Elite battery test

Although the new ROG Phone may be one of the first Snapdragon 8 Elite Phonesthe hardware similarities to its predecessor make it a great phone for comparison. Its display specs are virtually unchanged, the camera capabilities are very similar, and its battery is only 7% larger, which is easy to take into account. Whether there are significant improvements in battery life will depend on the processor. Here’s what I found.

We consider these numbers an approximation (every user is different, after all), but battery life improved in all of our tests, and two key things really stood out. First, the camera and video capture tests achieve a relatively small improvement of 10% and 6%, respectively. Their improvements are almost certain due to the bigger battery, so the new chip is about equal here. Constantly running camera hardware is a huge drain on battery power, making CPU efficiency gains less significant.

However, move to cases where the CPU is a larger factor in power consumption and the battery life improvements increase significantly. Web browsing is the biggest winner, with a whopping 46% improvement that takes the phone just under 15 hours of constant use. 4K Playback and Zoom Meetings also see a substantial increase of 30% each, perhaps a little lower than the Web test because they also rely on other hardware blocks, like the video decoder. Still, these use cases benefit from TSMC’s 3nm node, and the lack of small cores clearly doesn’t hurt Qualcomm’s CPU design for these types of tasks.

Subtracting the larger battery, Qualcomm’s claimed 45% efficiency increase is a bit higher than the results I’ve seen, so it’s definitely a better niche scenario. I calculated that the Snapdragon 8 Elite averaged about an 18% increase in battery life across these five tests, peaking at 39% in the web test. This is still a significant improvement that will result in several hours of additional screen time for real-world use cases.

We all crave longer battery life and too often turn to higher capacity batteries to withstand a day of heavy use. Although the ROG tested here also has a huge battery, it’s now clearly more than most will need. A much more efficient processor changes this dynamic; we can have exceptional autonomy without taking up large batteries (and phones). This might just be one of the biggest benefits of upgrading to a new Snapdraogn 8 Elite phone, like the next one SamsungGalaxy S25in the coming months.

Of course, we shouldn’t dismiss the performance potential of the Snapdragon 8 Elite either. It clearly compares very well, offering a notable improvement over the previous generation. However, there are certainly diminishing returns for real-world performance, both in terms of typically lightweight applications like web browsing and even gaming, where achieving a consistent 60fps rarely requires the latest GPU mobile. Switching to a new processor won’t necessarily make your phone snappier, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite will extend battery life.

That said, I don’t expect all Snapdragon 8 Elite phones to offer the same efficiency benefits that I’ve seen here. Hardware and software optimizations play their own role, and ASUS’ balanced performance profile certainly doesn’t make the processor run at full throttle. Still, I’m more than cautiously optimistic that next-generation smartphones will see significant battery life improvements thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite.