Your Snapdragon 8 Elite series phone could soon get a boost for emulators

The Snapdragon 8 Elite and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 are two of the most powerful Android phone processors on the market. These chips can run even the most demanding games, but one issue is that they don’t play nicely with bleeding-edge emulators. Fortunately, there’s good news if you have a phone or handheld with one of these chips.

According to a Mesa GitLab page and the GameHub Discord channel, a Turnip driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno 8xx GPUs is currently in development. Furthermore, it could be released as soon as early 2026. Developer and Qualcomm employee Rob Clark specifically mentioned that this driver would support the Adreno 840 GPU inside the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but suggested that it would also support the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s Adreno 830 GPU. That wouldn’t be a surprise, as the two chipsets have a similar “sliced” GPU architecture.

This is great news as open-source Turnip drivers generally deliver better performance and improved compatibility when running cutting-edge apps such as GameHub, RPCSX-UI-Android, Eden, and other advanced emulators. You can still run these emulators on your Snapdragon 8 Elite/8 Elite Gen 5 device, but it’s not uncommon to see performance issues and bugs. In fact, this situation has resulted in devices with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and earlier being recommended for demanding emulators over the 8 Elite family of chips.

Nevertheless, our fingers are crossed that these open-source drivers unlock the full potential of Qualcomm’s powerful Elite chips. Now, about Qualcomm’s chips supporting the Linux Terminal app on Android.