Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Drops HPM, 8K60 and APV Features Found on Gen 5

The two chips share 5GHz peak clock speeds, a new GPU architecture and many new AI features, Android Authority reported. The regular Gen 6 lacks cutting-edge video codecs, Matrix cores for AI graphics and 50% more local memory to support on-device AI models. Those omissions may make sense on cost, but some of the missing features were already available on the previous generation, the report says.

The most significant missing feature is High Performance Memory, or HPM, which Android Authority describes as the biggest omission. On the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, HPM was 18MB of tightly coupled GPU cache, while the Gen 5 V-Series had 12MB. The regular Gen 6 has none, and only the Extreme variant includes it this year. HPM is a small graphics memory cache dedicated solely to the Adreno GPU, designed to alleviate bandwidth bottlenecks when handling high-quality models and textures, antialiasing and advanced graphical effects. According to Qualcomm, HPM reduces latency and improves memory efficiency by up to 10% when processing more demanding workloads, which benefits visual fidelity, performance and power efficiency for longer play sessions. Gamers stand to lose out on performance and power efficiency, the report says.

HPM has one drawback: it appears to require game developers to code for it specifically, telling the GPU what to store in the fast memory to speed up their game. Thanks to Qualcomm’s Neural Fusion development efforts, new games built on Unity and Unreal Engine can benefit without code modifications, but other engines must be built specifically for HPM if they handle raw graphics via Qualcomm’s custom Vulkan implementation. Android Authority notes that the games and emulators a user prefers might not support HPM at this time. Qualcomm may not have seen the uptake it initially hoped for, or a move to LPDDR6 may lessen the need for HPM. For a flagship chipset meant to last the next five years or more, the absence of HPM and Matrix cores for AI upscaling is a significant omission for serious mobile gamers, the report says.

Video recording also differs. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme supports 8K60 video recording and ultra-high-speed 4K240 slow motion. Those drop to 8K30 and 4K120 on the regular model, a direct downgrade from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which supported 8K60 recording. Concrete color standards—10-bit color depth photo and video capture, Rec. 2020 color gamut and Google Ultra HDR support—have been stripped from the Gen 6 spec sheet, replaced by generic “Elite Color Engine” marketing, Android Authority reported. That does not mean some of these are not supported, but Qualcomm is pushing high-end video requirements toward the Extreme chip, while the capabilities were already listed on last year’s Gen 5.

The regular Gen 6 does match the Gen 5’s 4K120 capture and improves 1080p slow motion to 960 FPS from 480 FPS. But 4K recording at 240 frames per second requires the Extreme. The regular Gen 6 also lacks the Advanced Professional Video codec, or APV. APV is an open-source, royalty-free video codec designed for professional video capture, production and editing workflows, and can be seen as a rival to Apple ProRes. Unlike distribution codecs such as H.264, HEVC/H.265 and AV1, which heavily compress video for streaming or playback, APV prioritizes maximum visual quality and computational speed for post-production editing. It compresses each frame individually and scales from 10-bit to 16-bit depth, supporting 4:2:2, 4:4:4 and 4:4:4:4 chroma subsampling.