Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra impresses with new overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 before global release
Samsung is just a few days away from replacing the Galaxy S25 Ultra globally. Based on recent leaks, Samsung's new Privacy Display will be one of the Galaxy S26 Ultra's standout upgrades over last year's model. By contrast, Samsung's new Ultra flagship is not expected to offer any substantial camera upgrades.
The switch to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset should bring noticeable performance and efficiency improvements to the table, though. The 'for Galaxy' variant will feature faster Prime Cores than Qualcomm's other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 variants too, which can boost 3% higher to 4.74 GHz.
The result is that the Galaxy S26 Ultra is already achieving benchmark scores that surpass many Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered smartphones we have tested so far. For instance, the Galaxy S26 Ultra regularly scores around 7% more in the Geekbench 6.5 multi-core benchmark than the OnePlus 15 (curr. $899 on Amazon).
Single-core performance is up there with the Honor Magic8 Pro, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and even the gaming-focused RedMagic 11 Pro, as is GPU performance in the OpenCL benchmark. Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S26 Ultra on February 25 alongside the cheaper Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26 Plus. Recent leaks indicate that the Galaxy Buds 4 and Galaxy Buds 4 Pro will be in attendance too.
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