Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme, which appear to be putting up some respectable CPU and GPU benchmarks, but there hasn't been much word on Linux compatibility until now. A recent Linux driver patch sees the start of adding open source driver support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series GPUs in the X2 Elite SoC to the open-source Qualcomm MSM Direct Rendering Management driver. The patch submission specifically calls out changes to the driver that were necessary because of the new slice-based architecture, as well as changes that allow for higher current draw and necessary thermal mitigations.

The development team also mentioned that Mesa and Vulkan support for the Adreno 840 and other 800 series Arm GPUs is currently work-in-progress and "will be posted in the near future". For reference, when it comes to the previous Snapdragon X Elite launch, there were significant driver updates as recently as July 2025, so even if the Qualcomm team is working on Linux driver support, it might be a while before Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme laptops are actually at feature-parity with x86 systems on Linux.

Qualcomm only just unveiled the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 as its latest flagship mobile SoC, and although there were early Geekbench results presented at the Snapdragon Summit event, the first real-world performance figures are starting to emerge, courtesy of the as-yet unreleased OnePlus 15. These tests, carried out by Geekerwan on YouTube mostly center around the Adreno 840 GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which is meant to deliver marked performance improvements, thanks to the inclusion of Snapdragon HPM (High Performance Memory) cache and updated GPU architecture. It's also important to note that these performance results won't necessarily be representative of results on other smartphones, since thermal management is a big determining factor for smartphone performance, especially when it comes to gaming and sustained workloads. The OnePlus device in question is also running pre-release drivers and firmware, so it's possible that more optimizations and performance gains are coming.

The YouTuber tested the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 across five different games (Honkai: Impact 3rd, Wuthering Waves, Honor of Kings, and Delta Force) and compared it to an iPhone 17 Pro Max and a MediaTek Dimensity 9500. The results are rather impressive, as the new Snapdragon SoC manages to keep up with the Apple A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro Max for the most part. He also performed his own Geekbench 6 tests and found that the results presented on Qualcomm's test devices at the Snapdragon Summit were representative of retail devices, with the OnePlus 15 scoring 12,352 points in the multicore benchmark and 3,836 in single-core tests.