Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra benchmarks pit Snapdragon against Exynos

The Samsung Galaxy S22, like its predecessors is set to be powered by a different chip depending on the region it’s sold in. But this generation, there’s a whole lot more interest thanks to the hype surrounding the Exynos 2200 chipset which has been made in conjunction with AMD and could make the phone a gaming powerhouse.

As such, tech fans have been keeping a close eye on leaked benchmarks, looking for any hint of a difference between the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 version tipped for most of the world and the Exynos 2200 model that’s reportedly mostly aimed at Europe. 

We’ve seen comparative benchmarks before, where the Qualcomm chip edged out the Exynos chip on single-core performance, but lost on multi-core. But now a new set of benchmarks puts that into reverse, with the Exynos model winning on single-core performance, but losing out on multi-core.

The Geekbench benchmarks in question that come from Geekbench were spotted by GSMArena and show the Qualcomm model (SM-S908B) registering a score of 1,168 for single-core and 3,508 for multi. The Exynos version (SM-S908U), meanwhile, manages 1,226 for the former but 3,462 on the latter.

Galaxy S22: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 vs Exynos 2200

The good news for Samsung is that these differences are absolutely tiny. You’re looking at a difference of less than 5%, and naturally that wouldn’t register in day-to-day use, even if you were using both devices side by side on identical tasks. And that means Samsung shouldn’t have to deal with grumpy users complaining that they can’t get the version they want in the region in which they live.

But crucially this doesn’t tell the full story. Geekbench doesn’t show graphical grunt, and that’s the area we’re expecting the biggest difference between chips. Samsung has made a big deal of the fact that the Exynos 2200 will pack AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics in its GPU — the same architecture used in both the PS5 and Xbox Series X. There’s even talk of the chip being capable of fancy effects like ray tracing. 

That sounds significant — and one graphical benchmark suggests it will be — but to play devil’s advocate once again, it may not be. Yes, theoretically your games could fly on the Exynos powered Galaxy S22, but developers don’t really make Android games as graphical showcases. The aim when developing for Android is to make your games playable on as many devices as possible, and given the Exynos 2200’s scarcity, we’d be curious to see how many devs take full advantage.

Which isn’t to say the Exynos 2200 won’t be the enthusiast’s chip of choice for the S22, especially if they play games that scale to match the phone’s internals — it just means that if you can’t get hold of one, you probably won’t be missing too much in the greater scheme of things.