2025 Gaming Hardware: Worth the upgrade?

This week’s column examines the flagship mobile processor from Snapdragon, the 8 Elite

Hyderabad: What do you get with the Snapdragon 8 elite and the new Nvidia RTX 50 series cards? It is a truth universally acknowledged that with the new year comes new hardware. Thus, it is only inevitable that 2025 sees the arrival of new mobile silicon from Snapdragon (8 Elite) and the much-awaited RTX 50 series GPU cards from NVIDIA. With such a big line up of hardware to choose from, there seems to be something for both mobile and PC gamers.

This week’s column examines the flagship mobile processor from Snapdragon, the 8 Elite. I draw from my own 3-week journey with the OnePlus 13 and its novel experiments with silicon-carbon battery tech to look at how the phone games, renders sound, and holds up in terms of battery consumption.

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Let’s dive right in. Most reviewers of mobile phones have in the last 45 days, gone into great detail to explain how the 8 Elite shows significant gains over its predecessor the 8 Gen 3. However, despite the benchmarks on AnTuTu and 3DMark’s Solar Bay, everyday usage is always different considering the wide variety of tasks we expect our phones to do.

I tested my phone with bursts of Infinity Nikki, Squad Busters, a bit of League of Legends: Wild Rift, and Monument Valley 3 while also heavily using WhatsApp for calls and my wireless earbuds for Bluetooth connectivity.

OnePlus has tuned the chip brilliantly and not once did I have trouble multi-tasking; however, I think you will experience the same benefits on most phones with the chip – like the IQOO 13, the Galaxy S25 series, and the upcoming Xiaomi 15 lineup.

The 8 Elite also runs most games without compromise on high resolutions (QHD ) and framerates (120Hz). In a demanding world like Infinity Nikki, I found no customary dip in performance after the first 20-30 minutes. Secondly, I also found that the chip was consuming very little power. For example, 30 minutes of Squad Busters on my Pixel 7 Pro meant a dip in 12-15 percent of charge whereas 30 minutes on the OP13 was less than 7 percent. Lastly, I also found that with the integration of the Snapdragon Sound suite of codecs in aptX, aptX HD, and aptX Low Latency, the chip offers very little lag or distortion on wireless earbuds or headphones.

With the 8 Elite’s many strengths, does it mean that this is such an amazing chip that you must get one immediately? Maybe not! For starters, it is much more expensive than the 8 Gen 3 and secondly, with most phone makers offering a more OS upgrades, there is no need to get one if your phone is guaranteed the next Android update. Lastly, phone batteries also seem to be getting more robust and if yours has withstood the demands of the everyday charging cycle, please stay put. However, if you are up for an upgrade and game on your phones, do consider the winning combo of the 8 Elite and a silicon-carbon battery.