While today’s flagship chipsets pack more power than you’ll need for browsing the web and checking socials, gaming and particularly emulating old titles continue to push these high-performing platforms to their thermal and sometimes even performance limits. At least, that’s what I found while running some of my old favorites on my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, but it’s certainly not the only option for emulator lovers.
If you’re in the market for the nippiest Android processors around, you can’t get faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite and the MediaTek Dimensity 9400. We’ve already tested them both on popular Android games, and the results are surprisingly close. But which handles heavy-hitting emulators with the smoothest frame rates?