OnePlus 15 Review: Has The Flagship Killer Finally Settled?

I used the OnePlus 15 on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Telus’ sub-6GHz 5G and 4G LTE networks in San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles, and Vancouver (Canada) and didn’t experience any hiccups with data speeds or call quality. While the OnePlus 15 also works fine with Verizon and most MVNOs in the US, it lacks mmWave 5G support. This really isn’t a big deal considering mmWave 5G is available in very few markets, and mostly from Verizon.

OnePlus 15 Reception And Sound Quality

OnePlus 15 Performance And Benchmark Results

Between Qualcomm’s mighty Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 flagship 3nm SoC, a triple-layer cooling system, the aforementioned 165Hz display, and dedicated Wi-Fi 7 and touch-controller chips developed in-house, OnePlus is leaning hard into performance and gaming with the OnePlus 15. This isn’t unusual for the company, but it reminds me of the marketing behind the OnePlus 10T back in 2022, which ended up being more of a gaming phone than an affordable flagship.

In the OnePlus 15, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is paired with 12 or 16GB of LPDDR5x Ultra/Ultra+ RAM and 256 or 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage. A version with 16GB of RAM and 1TB is also available in some markets. That triple-layer cooling system, which OnePlus calls 360 Cryo-Velocity Cooling System, consists of a screen cooler in the front, a massive 5,731mm² 3D vapor chamber in the middle, and a white graphite back cover.

As you’d expect, the OnePlus 15 feels incredibly responsive day-to-day. It’s super quick regardless of the task at hand. Whether you’re playing hard-core games or juggling a bunch of productivity, communication, social media, and entertainment apps, the OnePlus 15 never skips a beat. The UI is smooth as butter, apps launch quickly, and everything runs like clockwork. It’s almost as if the phone is able to predict your next step.

While I’m very pleased with the OnePlus 15’s subjective performance, things took a strange turn when I started running our usual suite of benchmarks. If you look at the results below, the OnePlus 15 is all over the map, sometimes matching expectations, other times falling short. Enabling High Performance Mode in the settings made little difference. HotHardware’s editor-in-chief, Dave Altavilla, confirmed my findings on his review unit as well.
I also experienced thermal issues when running 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light Unlimited stress test. The OnePlus 15 would overheat (with on-screen warnings), and 3DMark would crash before completing the stress test. Oddly, this behavior appeared to be dependent on ambient room temperature. The benchmark would fail at higher temperatures (72°F) and complete at lower temperatures (68°F). No matter the outcome, the phone would get uncomfortably hot.

I reached out to OnePlus about this issue, and received the following statement:

“In everyday use – whether multitasking or heavy-duty gaming – the units run within normal thermal limits; we’ve received no reports of excessive heat.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 delivers our highest peak performance yet, so in prolonged, all-out workloads it reaches the thermal ceiling sooner. We are already refining the thermal curve so that our peak performance remains uncompromised while surface temperatures stay comfortable.”

OnePlus 15 Geekbench Results

GeekBench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics calculation scenarios. We tested all of the smartphones featured here with GeekBench's single and multi-core workloads.

GeekBench 6 includes new ways of testing multicore configurations and uses higher-resolution assets. As you can see, the OnePlus 15 performed quite well in this test, but scored lower than expected in the multi-core workload.

OnePlus 15 AnTuTu 8 Benchmarks

AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of metrics ranked with somewhat nebulous scores, rather than frame rates or time to complete. Here we're running the latest version of AnTuTu across multiple Android devices. AnTuTu returns four top level performance results which are all included here: CPU, RAM, 3D, UX (or User Experience), along with a total score.


According to AnTuTu, the OnePlus 15 offers an notable increase in performance vs. previous generation Android handsets, slotting right below Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's prototype in terms of its overall score.

OnePlus 15 Graphics And Gaming Benchmarks Results

Now, let's take a look at how the OnePlus 15 stacks up in GFXBench, which has been one of the standard mobile graphics/gaming performance benchmarks for years. To ensure that display refresh (v-sync) and resolution aren't limiting factors, we're comparing off-screen test results here. GFXBench tests OpenGL ES graphics workloads and we're specifically testing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, as well as Vulkan in the latest iterations.

Unfortunately, we're not seeing the kind of performance improvement we expected from a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-equipped device like the OnePlus 15. This phone performs about the same as Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered devices like Samsung's Galaxy S25 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold7 in these graphically rich, gaming-oriented benchmarks. 

OnePlus 15 3DMark Wild Life Benchmark Tests

OnePlus 15 Performance Over Thermal Saturation

OnePlus 15 Additional Features And Battery Life

Like its predecessors, the OnePlus 15 supports fast charging at up to 100W wired (SuperVOOC + USB-PPS) and up to 50W wireless (AirVOOC + Qi). Plus, the phone still comes with a 100W SuperVOOC charger in the box, unlike the competition. Keep in mind that in regions with 120V power, like in the US, SuperVOOC maxes out at 80W. Sadly, the OnePlus 15 doesn’t come with built-in magnets, but OnePlus sells optional magnetic cases.