Recent rumors indicate that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will come equipped with the same battery and charging hardware as the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and while tipsters still agree with that claim, we're now hearing that the upcoming phone could still boast better battery life than its predecessor.
According to a Vietnam-based Discord leaker (via X and PhoneArena), Qualcomm’s yet-to-be-released Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset, which is expected to power the Galaxy S25 Ultra and more of the best Android phones in 2025, will feature vastly improved GPU power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
In theory, this should result in better battery performance for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, even if both devices share the same battery hardware (specifically a 5,000mAh battery and 45W wired charging capabilities).
“Improving CPU efficiency [of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4] “It’s in the single digits, but the GPU boost is huge,” leaker @negativeonehero writes on X. “[MediaTek] D9300 peak performance at half the power is possible.” In simple terms, this means that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 might be able to deliver the peak performance of the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 GPU at half the power consumption. Wow!
Of course, this is welcome news for prospective Galaxy S25 Ultra buyers who may have been left worried about potential battery life improvements (or lack thereof) on Samsung’s 2025 flagship. That said, these same rumored benchmarks paint a disappointing picture of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4’s CPU performance, which could very well mean that the Galaxy S25 Ultra offers little to no tangible speed improvements over the Galaxy S24.
In fact, @negativeonehero ends his post X with the comment: “If you care about CPU performance, skip this generation and wait for the 8G5.” [the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5].”
Mind you, as we noted in our defense of the iPhone 16’s alleged lack of performance improvements over the iPhone 15 Pro, we’ve arguably hit a saturation point when it comes to the speed of flagship phones. Do we really need these devices to be any faster? The Galaxy S24 Ultra is one of the most powerful phones ever made, and we’d bet you’d barely notice the difference in real-world performance even if the Galaxy S25 Ultra brought dramatic CPU improvements.
We'd rather see Qualcomm prioritise power efficiency over performance improvements with its next Snapdragon chipset, and by the looks of it, the company is doing just that. We're expecting to hear more about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 at this year's edition of Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit, so check back with TechRadar in October for all the latest Galaxy-related announcements.
