Samsung officially announced its new Galaxy S22 Ultra yesterday, but things aren't a sure-fire win for its RDNA2 graphics engine — according to multiple sources, including ComputerBase and TechAltar, it appears the chip is not nearly as fast as expected.
The Exynos 2200's CPU specs include four Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.7GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores at 2.5GHz, and a single high-performance X2 core clocked at 2.8GHz. The chip also has a custom RDNA2 GPU from AMD branded as the Samsung Xclipse 920. For reference, its direct competition, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, packs the same core configuration with slightly higher clock speeds on the A510 and X2 cores, but it comes with Qualcomm's homemade Adreno GPU.
It's worth noting that Samsung's S22 lineup will come with options for both SoCs, despite the Snapdragon being a competing brand. Unfortunately, you can't buy the Exynos version of the S22 if you live in the United States. As with previous generation Samsung flagships, Samsung uses the Snapdragon SoCs for US versions of the S22 series (the 8 Gen 1). But internationally, the S22 lineup will pack Samsung's own Exynos 2200.
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Based on preliminary results, Tech Altar says the Exynos 2200 numbers aren't that impressive, with just a 5% performance gain over the Exynos 2100 on the CPU side and a 17% gain for the RDNA2 GPU.
However, because there hasn't been a full review yet, it's worth noting these are just first impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, if these performance numbers are true, it won't be that competitive against the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which ironically powers Samsung's entire S22 lineup in the United States.
For reference, the previous-gen Samsung flagship, the Exynos 2100 with its Mali-G78 GPU, and Qualcomm's previous-gen flagship, the Snapdragon 888 with its Adreno 660 GPU, have incredibly similar GPU performance according to GSMArena (when thermals aren't a concern) with basically identical results in 3DMark.
If we consider this data, Qualcomm says its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 GPU is 30% faster than the 888 with its Adreno 660 (as reported by TechArena24). Since we already know the Exynos 2100 SoC has nearly identical GPU performance to the previous-gen 888, we can conclude that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is also 30% faster than the 2100.
This means Qualcomm has already beat Samsung's Exynos 2200's GPU by 13% with its latest-gen SoC, despite the 2200 packing an AMD RDNA2 GPU.
Again, we'll have to wait for official reviews of both the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 equipped S22's, as well as the RDNA2-equipped version of the Exynos 2200, to see how the chips really perform.
Samsung flagship Exynos SoCs don't have the best reputation because several of its previous flagships were known to have severe overheating problems and suffer major performance drops when under heavy use for long periods of time. In fact, this is still somewhat of a problem today, with Exynos 2100-powered S21s suffering as much as a 19% performance degradation compared to the Snapdragon 888 versions under heavy load.
If Samsung can't beat Qualcomm in the GPU department, we hope the S22 Ultra reviews show Samsung was able to make the Exynos 2200 far more efficient during extended gaming sessions with help from AMD. If not, we could see international versions of the S22 series be slower than the S22 lineup that lands in the United States.
