Qualcomm announced its latest flagship-level mobile platform, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 delivers new generative AI features, 240fps mobile gaming and studio-quality lossless audio, and is expected to power a slew of high-end smartphones next year. So how does it compare to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2?

We have summarized the main differences between these two mobile platforms.

Qualcomm focuses on generative AI this year

When creating Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm paid great attention to one of the buzzwords of 2023: generative artificial intelligence.

The Qualcomm AI Engine in Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the company’s first to support multi-modal generative AI models (including large language models, language vision models, and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition) all on-device.

This means the chipset can render images in fractions of a second, large language models can run at up to 20 tokens per second, allowing your AI assistant to respond to you faster, and performance is also faster on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU and Qualcomm Sensing Hub income.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is more powerful than its predecessor

When it comes to pure performance, Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU reaches new heights in the Snapdragon Gen 3 with five gold performance cores and 2 efficiency cores instead of the four performance cores and three efficiency cores in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

This provides 30% better performance and 20% better power efficiency, while the upgraded Qualcomm Adreno GPU also offers 25% better performance and 25% better power efficiency.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a smarter camera

According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 includes the “world’s smartest AI-powered camera.”

Announced in Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Cognitive ISP now allows users to capture unique content with productive AI voice-activated photo and video editing, while the camera supports up to 12 layers of Semantic Segmentation for more detailed and accurate images.

The camera also supports AI-powered editing tools, including Arcsoft’s Video Object Eraser to move unwanted people and objects around, and Photo Stretch to expand a photo beyond what was captured.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 supports 240fps gaming

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also includes mobile gaming upgrades, including support for smooth, lag-free 240fps gaming on 240Hz displays.

Other gaming features supported by Snapdragon Elite Gaming include Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing (40% better this time and with support for Global Illumination) and Snapdragon Gaming Super Resolution for upscaling gaming scenes to up to 8K external displays.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 offers faster connections

According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 includes the first 5G modem with integrated AI tensor hardware accelerator for better speed, coverage, mobility, connection stability and location accuracy.

The chipset also features the only Wi-Fi system that supports High-Band Simultaneous Multi-connection for fast, low-latency performance.