The review embargo for Galaxy S22 phones hasn't lifted yet, but benchmark scores are beginning to make their way online. In the US, the S22 will come equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Gen1, while other countries will get a version with Samsung's own Exynos 2200 SoC under the hood. Unfortunately, it looks like there may be a substantial performance gap between these two versions.
Phone Enthusiast Erdi Özüağ (via VideoCardz) was lucky enough to obtain two samples of the S22 Ultra, one equipped with the latest Exynos chip and the other with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon mobile chip. With these two phones, the YouTuber was able to compare the two SoCs, the Exynos 2200 equipped with the AMD RDNA 2-based Xclipse 920 GPU and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 featuring the Adreno 730 GPU.
It's a bit alarming to me that in GPU stress tests of #GalaxyS22Ultra, the Snapdragon 8G1 has a stability of 48% while the Exynos 2200 has 72%.
The Exynos 2200 really has that much better sustained performance????
Are we seeing history lol
Source: @PBKreviews @TheTechChap pic.twitter.com/5YseGv0J72— Golden Reviewer (@Golden_Reviewer) February 11, 2022
Analysing the scores, we see that the Exynos 2200 phone performs similar to the S21 Ultra featuring the Exynos 2100. However, the difference is evident compared to the Snapdragon Gen1-equipped phone, with the Exynos 2200 being much slower. To be more precise, when putting the 3DMark Wild Life scores of both S22 Ultra phones side-to-side, the Snapdragon is about 30% faster.
It's clear which SoC offers the best GPU peak performance, but most phones lack sustained performance, and that's where the Exynos 2200 may shine. According to PBK reviews (via Golden Retriever), the new Exynos flagship SoC is much more stable than the Snapdragon chip, meaning scores tend to reduce more on Snapdragon 8 Gen1-based phones.
It's worth noting that Samsung announced it would launch an update to improve performance on the S22 phones before release, which may increase peak and sustained performance.
KitGuru says: The Galaxy S22 isn't available yet and Samsung has promised more updates, so we may see improved peak performance in later benchmarks.