Exynos 2200 vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 1: Samsung's new chipset fares worse in early real-world gaming tests

The Samsung Galaxy S22 series has slowly gotten into user hands, particularly in Europe where the phones are powered by Samsung's in-house Exynos 2200. While benchmarks have established that the Exynos 2200 slightly lags behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in peak performance, a new test has now provided a good look at real-world gaming performance of Samsung's latest flagship chipset.

In yet another test carried out by Golden Reviewer, the Exynos 2200-powered Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra fails to match Samsung's lofty marketing for its new Xclipse 920 RDNA 2-based GPU. The Galaxy S22 Ultra only manages an average frame rate of 30.2 fps, with frames even dropping as low as 16 fps—making for a rather shambolic performance. 

A direct comparison can be made with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, as it was put through this same test on a Motorola Edge X30. In that test, even at its worse, the Qualcomm chipset held an average of 48 fps, although it admittedly dropped lower than 40 fps several times. 

With regards to power consumption, the Exynos 2200 takes about 4.4 W on average. Interestingly, though, the chip manages to be consistent with that, further confirming previous stability tests. On the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 test, the Qualcomm chipset requires about 6.3 W even when throttling.

Those numbers show that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 easily performs better than the Exynos 2200, at least on Genshin Impact. That said, the Samsung chipset is quite conservative with its power consumption. Again, likely intentional by Samsung in an attempt to not create a power-hungry, inefficient chipset. There's also the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is still young on the market, and is powered by a brand new GPU. Further optimization may well see the Galaxy S22 series and Exynos 2200 perform a lot better than shown here.

Buy the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra on Amazon.