Exynos 2200 graphics benchmarks are promising but premature

Samsung's Exynos processor has had a topsy-turvy history in the past few years. It almost seemed like Samsung was on the road to catching up with Qualcomm, only for it to take a sharp nosedive with the Exynos 990 in the Galaxy S20 last year. The company is hedging its bets on its partnership with AMD to produce a processor that takes advantage of Radeon graphics technology. The Exynos 2200 might just be around the corner, and a recent benchmark seemingly proves its mettle, but some caveats have to be considered before giving it a blue ribbon.

Graphics performance is slowly becoming the new arena for smartphones after cameras. The profitable mobile gaming market is pushing phone makers to push mobile GPUs to the limit, or at least advertise their graphical chops. Samsung has been laying the foundations for its takeover of that particular market with its AMD partnership, and things seem to be looking good, at least as far as benchmarks go.

The Exynos 2200 is believed to come with an AMD mRDNA GPU that sports 6 compute units and runs at 1.31GHz, at least for the test. Results of a GFXBench 3.0 run were shared on Twitter, revealing rather impressive figures, especially when compared to the Apple A14 Bionic. The Manhattan 3.1 test, for example, yielded a high 170.7 fps for the Exynos 2200, while the A14 Bionic couldn't go higher than 120 fps.

Exynos 2200 AMD mRDNA architecture GPU
June sample
6CU based 1.31Ghz clock test
with AMD provided development beta version driver

Manhattan 3.1: 170.7 fps
Aztec normal: 121.4 fps
Aztec high: 51.5 fps

Similar to A14 (reference below)

Source:https://t.co/kO58OaB12b

— Tron ❂ (@FrontTron) August 24, 2021

That said, the Apple A14 Bionic is last year's chipset, and the Exynos 2200 will be competing against the Apple A15 as well as an Apple M1X. Furthermore, SamMobile notes that these scores are actually lower than last year's benchmarks, hinting that Samsung and AMD are trying to balance performance, power consumption, and heat generation.

In other words, the real-world performance of the Exynos 2200 inside phones could be significantly lower than these early benchmarks, especially when taking into account thermal management and power limitations. It could still turn out to be better than what we currently have in the market, but Qualcomm is reportedly also preparing to give the next Snapdragon 895 a significant graphics boost as well.