Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 mobile processing platform is due to drop later this year, but the company was showing off the new system-on-a-chip at Mobile World Congress. We got to check out a lot of cool features the new CPU will offer, including media and audio, but we also had some time to have a go at gaming with Qualcomm’s latest innovation.

Of course, the main goal here is gaming performance, and Qualcomm achieves a blend of high-quality graphics and responsiveness through the deployment of an Adreno 330 GPU coupled with the Krait-based quad-core processor. The chip can achieve clock speeds of over 2.0GHz, simply eclipsing anything on the market today.

The chip was being demoed within a reference tablet, which offered the buttery smoothness you could expect from a dedicated gaming machine, if not console quality graphics. Qualcomm had two demos for consumption, a full-on version of Need For Speed: Most Wanted and a demo showcasing a rendered image of a fire-breathing dragon, complete with benchmarks. While the latter offered a glimpse behind the scenes, Need For Speed was obviously the draw here, streamed direct from the tablet to the a TV.

Snapdragon 800 will no doubt be a hit with manufacturers already utilizing the company’s 600 series platform. And that’s basically everyone release a high-end phone within the past six months. Real world use will be the ultimate test of how the 800 fairs, but the future looks promising.