Qualcomm's 8s Gen 4 chip brings 'Elite' gaming features for premium phones

With a new Adreno GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip gets support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, 4K graphic upscaling, and more

American chipmaker Qualcomm has introduced its latest System-on-Chip (SoC) for premium smartphones—the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4. Built on TSMC’s N4P 4nm process, the chip features a Kryo CPU architecture instead of the new Oryon architecture found in Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite. The key feature of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is its new Adreno GPU, which brings high-end gaming abilities, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and graphic upscaling.   

 

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4: What is new

 

The CPU part of the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip includes a single Kryo Prime core clocked at up to 3.2 GHz and several Kyro Performance cores clocked at up to 3.0 GHz. According to the company, the chip offers a 31 per cent improvement in performance and 39 per cent better power efficiency compared to last year’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip.   

 

 

The chip’s highlight is the new Adreno GPU, which Qualcomm said improves gaming performance by up to 49 per cent. This also enables the chip to support “Snapdragon Elite Gaming” features such as:   

• Real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing with Global Illumination for improved lighting, shadow, and reflection details in game graphics.   
• Snapdragon Game Super Resolution 2.0 which upscales lower resolution game visuals to up to 4K quality.
• Qualcomm Adaptive Performance Engine for optimising performance for longer sessions.

For on-device AI processing, the chip features an updated Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). This brings support for multimodal and multilingual AI assistants and up to 44 per cent faster AI performance.    

 

Qualcomm has also added an 18-bit triple image signal processor (ISP) that enables support for up to 320MP camera sensors and 4K HDR video recording at 60 fps. The chip also features an integrated Snapdragon X75 5G modem that supports sub-6GHz spectrum, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity.   

 

Although not officially confirmed, the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip is expected to be first used in iQOO Z10 series smartphones later this month.