Asus announces ROG Phone 9 with Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset

Asus has announced that the ROG Phone 9 will launch on November 19, and come equipped with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

The company will launch the new gaming phone at its virtual “AI On, Game On” launch event, which suggest AI will play a role in the phone’s gaming experience.

Asus is likely to become one of the first phone makers to release a Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phone, and has presented the phone in live demos at the Snapdragon Summit 2024.

The ROG Phone 9 makes use of the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU and Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and is “designed to offer an immersive, lag free gaming experience”.

This Oryon CPU has been the focus of much fanfare thanks to its two performance cores clocked at 4.32GHz – apparently the fastest mobile CPU cores on the market.

The ROG Phone 9 follows up the ROG Phone 8 Pro, our current pick for the best gaming phone, and we expect to see it join or replace its predecessor once we’ve had a chance to put it through our rigorous testing process.

In terms of design, Asus calls the ROG Phone 9 “gamer-centric”: an angular camera bump, textured back panel, and what appears to be a dot matrix display on the rear of the phone give it a unique look in keeping with the wider Republic of Gamers brand.

And while Asus are promising the “smoothest gaming experience with immersive features”, we’ve yet to see any performance benchmarks beyond the general specifications of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

Snapdragon 8 Elite – the race is on

As mentioned, the ROG Phone will likely be one of the first phones to ship with Qualcomm’s new flagship chipset, and we expect to see the Snapdragon 8 Elite pop up in many of the best phones going forward.

Xiaomi is tipped to be the first company to release a phone powered by the new chipset, though with the upcoming Xiaomi 15 series unlikely to see a US release the ROG Phone 9 still has a chance of being the first globally released Snapdragon 8 Elite phone.

As we previously reported, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is probably the rumored Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in all but name, and will likely represent an incremental upgrade for the de facto leader in the Android chipset world.

For the latest updates on the ROG Phone 9, be sure to follow our Asus phones coverage – and for all the latest from this year’s Snapdragon Summit, be sure to check out our phones coverage and computing coverage.