The OnePlus 15 smartphone is still around a month away from being officially unveiled, but we may have already seen our first review. Kind of.
YouTuber Geekerwan has posted a brief six-minute video offering a first look at the follow-up to the OnePlus 13, with a specific focus on its gaming performance.
Among the phone’s new specifications, it’ll be one of the first to run Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, so this is of considerable interest – especially with Apple throwing down the gauntlet with the iPhone 17 Pro and its liquid-cooled A19 pro chip.
OnePlus 15 benchmarks
The reviewer’s initial benchmark results make for interesting reading, beating the iPhone 17 Pro Max on Geekbench 6 multi-core but falling short on single-core.
Tests suggest that the OnePlus 15’s new CPU falls just a little short of the iPhone’s on efficiency, too.
On the GPU front, the OnePlus 15 / Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 combo beats Apple’s latest in 3DMark benchmarks and efficiency tests, though it’s quite a close-run thing. This is going to be a good year for mobile gamers, it seems.
Indeed in real world gaming performance on a particularly challenging section of Honkai Star Rail, the OnePlus 15 got even closer to the magic 60fps mark than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Again, though, we’re talking fractions here, while the power draw was slightly higher and the running temperature higher than Apple’s beast.
Eugen Wegmann
165Hz display
The reviewer also used his video to highlight the OnePlus 15’s big new screen spec – a 165Hz refresh rate. They claim that the greater responsiveness leads to the ability to fire more bullets in the Crossfire game. Delta Force also seems to support this elevated refresh rate.
Support seems to be increasing for 165Hz refresh rates, particularly among competitive shooters, so we’ll be watching this one with interest.
That’s it for insights, unfortunately and we don’t get a proper look at anything other than the display of the OnePlus 15. Still, it’s good to get confirmation that this thing is going to be a beast when it comes to performance and gaming.