There's a new mobile gaming champ in town and it's not the iPhone 16 Pro

Enough with the big cat references but, somewhere along the quest for ravishing AI calculations, Apple lost the crown of the fastest CPU and GPU gun in the Wild Silicon West. This, however, might have been a deliberate strategy on the part of Apple, as today's mobile chipsets are way too powerful for anything an app or a game may throw at them.

Until recently, Apple was willing to pull ahead of the Qualcomms and MediaTeks of this world, riding on a steady supply of the highest quality wafers hence clock frequencies, as well as customized GPU designs. Now that everyone is a TSMC foundry client vying for the latest production node, this has become harder or uneconomical for it to pull off, and it gets beat quite often.

Typically, Qualcomm makes a custom Snapdragon processor version for Samsung that is clocked higher than for its other customers, and is tailored to its needs that are now revolving around artificial intelligence calculations.

Thus, Samsung's upcoming S25 family of flagship phones will also be powered by a special version of Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset called, as usual, Snapdragon for Galaxy. 

Given that the S24 series managed to beat the Apple A17 in the graphics subsystem benchmarks, the S25 is likely to reinforce that trend.

The reference board of that same chipset has appeared in benchmark databases clocked at 4.32 GHz for the peak processing cores, and 3.53 GHz for the midrange cores. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 also leaked out running on a US-bound Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, but clocked at 4.19 GHz peak and 2.9 GHz midrange core speeds.

Carrying the model number SM-S938B, however, a European Galaxy S25 Ultra model has been listed on Geekbench with record clock speeds of 4.47 GHz for the performance cores, and the jaw-dropping 3.53 GHz for the midrange cores.

If those results hold water in the end, the Galaxy S25 Ultra will be fast, much faster than even the iPhone 16 Pro Max whose Apple A18 Pro chipset broke the 4 GHz barrier for the first time on an iPhone, and yet is clocked lower than the Snapdragon for Galaxy on the S25 Ultra.

For comparison, the single-core score of the iPhone 16 Pro Max returns 3331 points in our Geekbench 6 test runs, which beats the leaked S25 Ultra single-core number, but Samsung's upcoming flagship one-ups the iPhone in the multicore score.

Qualcomm and Samsung are most likely still tweaking the exclusive features that the tailored Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for Galaxy will offer, though. These are engineering prototypes, and they are still finding where is the sweet point in the power draw and performance tradeoff, so the Apple A18 Pro chip may still meet its match in the single-core realm, too.

Apple's A18 chipset has met another match that not only debuts the highest multicore score, but also excels in gaming benchmarks. MediaTek just announced its most powerful chipset to date, the Dimensity 9400.

Built on TSMC's second-gen 3nm process, just like the Snapdragon for Galaxy S25 or the Apple A18 Pro, the chipset sports an Immortalis-G925 GPU with 40% faster peak and ray tracing performance than its previous edition. 

Given that Qualcomm asks north of $200 just for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 alone, making it the most expensive flagship phone component, phone makers are increasingly turning to MediaTek for help with production costs as the Dimensity 9400 is reportedly priced at "just" $150.

The latest Oppo Find X8 Pro, for instance, will be arriving with Dimensity 9400 on board, and its graphics prowess just got tested against the Apple A18 Pro on the iPhone 16 Pro.

To save you the suspense, Apple's iPhone 16 Pro got schooled in the gaming performance under sustained pressure department by the Find X8 Pro thanks to the Dimensity chipset. The flagship Oppo phone maintained an average frame rate above 60 FPS at all times, while the iPhone 16 Pro dipped deep and often to only average 47 FPS on Genshin Impact.

In short, Apple no longer makes the best phones for gaming, not even the latest 16 Pro, which gives way in terms of a graphics subsystem performance to the 2024 flagship chipsets by MediaTek and Qualcomm. These, however, are twice as expensive, especially the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.

These are also edging Apple's mobile chip out in multicore benchmark speeds, too, and about the last bastion of performance advantage for iPhones now lays in their peak single-core scores that are an all but improbable scenario in day-to-day operations. 

Whether these faster chipsets are worth their much higher price tag, however, will be for Android phone makers to decide, as Apple has seemingly thrown in the towel on pushing the processing speed limits and is now all in on AI calculations and extra features.