Snapdragon X2 Elite Adreno Driver Update Causes 87% LLM Performance Drop and 6x Premiere Render Times

New Adreno GPU driver update from Qualcomm has just created massive performance hit for people working with AI or video editing. This is the Snapdragon X2 Elite platform specifically that is affected by massive performance drops in local LLM inference and Premiere Pro rendering times in Adobe. Those who depend on any type of productivity tools will need to skip this update, or roll back to previous version immediately.

Qualcomm Adreno driver 32.0.181.0 severely impacts OpenCL workloads on Windows

Adreno driver 32.0.181.0 (which replaced 32.0.172.2 on Windows) has become a big problem. Community feedback reveals the problem is only in OpenCL backend for llama.cpp for local AI. WebGPU is fine, so it seems to be the issue with OpenCL implementation.

• Adreno Driver Version: 32.0.181.0
• Previous Adreno Driver Version: 32.0.172.2
• LLM Performance Drop: 69 to 87 percent slower
• Premiere Render Time Increase: 6x longer
• Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct Performance: 5.9 tokens per second (down from 26.8)

Performance numbers on some specific benchmarks are just scary. For example, local LLM text generation speed has been hit with a 69-87% drop. So Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct is now going from 26.8 tokens per second to just 5.9. Premiere Pro rendering times in Adobe have become terrible as well: 1080p video (7 minutes) now takes ~10 minutes to render (before it was 1min 40sec).

People are literally saying don't use this. For example, 'If you use Premiere, don't update your GPU driver to version 32.0.181.0.' And there are confirmations in terms of AI performance hit: 'Local LLM text generation performance became 69 – 87% slower after updating from driver 32.0.172.2 to 32.0.181.0' (this is from people's reports). So yeah, a lot of performance hits in the latest Adreno GPU driver update.

People can fix the performance issue with driver roll back to 32.0.172.2. Seems like the OpenCL backend on Windows has the problem. CPU and NPU performance are mostly fine. (Here we covered the previous update of Adreno GPU with some of the same themes on balance and stability. It's something…)