The Galaxy S7 is easily one of the best smartphones this year and Samsung has once again packed in loads of high performance hardware under the hood, however for those who wants to purchase the phone for gaming here’s a bad news, as the Exynos variant of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge are expected to see performance drops in the graphics department when compared to the Snapdragon variant. According to reports from Digital Trends, which gets its source from benchmarking app Antutu, the Snapdragon 820 is 32 percent faster in graphics when compared to Exynos 8890 SoC, hence this can be a major issue down the road when Android devices start getting higher quality games, especially when Samsung announced its support for the Vulkan API on its new phones.
The Exynos 8890 still remains as Samsung’s most advanced silicon to date, it sports a new set of quad Exynos M1 high performance cores that delivers siginificant performance improvements over its predecessor while maintaining an additional quad Cortex A53 cores for low power applications. On the other hand, the Snapdragon 820 is a quad-core SoC that features four Qualcomm-made Kryo cores with two high performance and two low power cores, which is totally a different approach from the company’s previous efforts and it definitely sounds like better efficiency over the Exynos. On the GPU side of things, the Exynos continues to use a Mali powered T880MP12 GPU while Qualcomm also uses its in house Adreno 530 GPU.
A quick check on both Wikipedia and chipmakers’ product page, the Mali GPU on the Exynos has a higher core clock speed than the Adreno 530, which the former should be able to outperform the latter in some ways but in early stages, we can assume that benchmark apps for now aren’t optimized yet for the advantage of this new Mali GPU, similar to the PC world we always have games usually optimized for either AMD and NVIDIA, which performance results will tend to differ with different manufacturer support. Hence, things will be interesting once games take advantage of the Vulkan API, which will be available on both platforms of the S7 and S7 edge, for now we shall keep our fingers crossed that the Exynos variant of the S7 and S7 edge will not see much difference in performance.
SOURCE: Antutu
VIA: DigitalTrends
