Since 2023, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips aimed at handheld gaming consoles. These are separate from the smartphone/tablet chips and are sold under the Snapdragon G brand. Today, the company refreshes the entire lineup with major improvements.
The Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 is the first G-series chip to support Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen. Lumen is a dynamic global illumination and reflections system. You can find more details here and in this video. Additionally, there is hardware acceleration for ray tracing, which isn’t available on the G2 and G1.
On top of the new features, the Gen 3 chip also brings performance upgrades. The 8-core CPU (1x prime, 5x performance and 2x efficiency) is 30% faster than the G3 Gen 2 CPU. The new Adreno A32 GPU is 28% faster.
The Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 is a massive upgrade over its predecessor with 2.3x boost in CPU performance and a whopping 3.8x increase in GPU capabilities. The CPU has a different mix of cores (1+4+3 instead of 1+5+2), but Qualcomm doesn’t offer details about what cores are used (Kryo or Oryon?).
The Adreno A22 GPU supports Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (upscaling) and Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 (frame gen), which are also available on the A32, but there’s no ray tracing hardware here. Both the G3 and G2 can drive QHD+ displays at up to 144Hz.
On the connectivity side, the new G3 and G2 chips feature Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3, plus optional 5G (sub-6GHz and mmWave) support.
The Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 is the affordable option and is largely intended for cloud gaming. It supports 1080p+ displays at up to 120Hz along with Wi-Fi 5 (ac) and Bluetooth 5.1. There is a 5G option available too.
The new CPU (2+6) lacks a prime core, but it is still 80% faster than its predecessor. The Adreno A12 delivers a more modest 25% improvement in performance. The focus here was on efficiency rather than performance.
“Starting this quarter,” there will be handheld gaming devices from the likes of AYANEO, ONEXSUGAR, Retroid Pocket and others featuring the new Snapdragon G chips. We’re not sure why Qualcomm wasn’t more specific with the dates, there are only a couple of weeks left in Q1.
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