Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy flagship smartphones is a purpose-built premium version designed specifically for Samsung and its latest Galaxy S24 series. This slightly tweaked SoC uses slightly overclocked Cortex-X4 cores and an Adreno750 GPU. These improvements were verified in 3DMark's SolarBay test. The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen3 Special Edition exceeded that of Apple's M2, while power consumption was significantly reduced, making it the first smartphone SoC to accomplish this feat.
Unfortunately, the Snapdragon 8Gen3 failed to achieve impressive results in other benchmarks such as GFXBench.
GoldenReviewer conducted extensive testing, and he praised the Galaxy version of Snapdragon 8Gen3 for surpassing the competition in 3DMark SolayBay, finally achieving a score of 9165FPS, while the M2 was 8781FPS, a performance difference of 4%. Even more impressively, Galaxy's Snapdragon 8Gen3 consumes less power than the M2 and is 35% more efficient than Apple's 5nm chip. Sadly, these results couldn't be replicated in 3DMarkWildLifeExtreme, where the M2 had the upper hand.
Given the M2's multiple leads in this particular benchmark, it's not hard to deduce that the M3 will score higher. 3DMarkWildLifeExtreme is designed to test how a chip performs under extreme stress, and given that Galaxy's Snapdragon 8 Gen3 has a smaller cooling area compared to the M2 and that Apple's MacBooks and iPad Pro also use this chip, it's obvious which SoC will win here. Sadly, the same story repeated itself at GFXBench, but this time, the reviewers provided some valuable information.
Since GoldenReviewer has tested a range of chips on GFXBench in the past, he believes that the reason why Galaxy's Snapdragon 8Gen3 did not achieve higher scores is due to bandwidth bottlenecks. However, he didn't mention whether this limitation comes from the benchmark program or the hardware itself, so we will need to confirm this in the future.