Have you ever wondered why games are still relatively new phones Galaxy don't play quite well despite being equipped with the best hardware on the market? It turned out that more than just the poor performance of the Exynos or Snapdragon chipsets is to blame. The real culprit is Samsung's GOS (Games Optimization Service), which aggressively throttles CPU and GPU performance.
A self-proclaimed South Korean YouTuber Square Dream, just renamed the popular benchmark app 3D Mark to Genshin Impact and found that just changing the name resulted in a significant drop in the resulting score. However, this slowdown is confirmed by multiple sources. Users in South Korean reacted similarly Clien forum, who instead renamed another popular benchmark, Geekbench, to Genshin Impact.
The current top of the portfolio Galaxy S22Ultra
They also found that in some cases there was almost a 50% drop in performance. However, the differences varied across generations of devices, with older ones such as Galaxy S10, showed only a slight drop in performance. The GOS system starts whenever a game is launched and contains a really long list of titles that it considers to be games (you can look at it here). Its items include, for example, Microsoft Office and YouTube Vanced.
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However, Samsung is aware of the problem and is actively addressing it. An official statement should be released soon, although the question is how they will actually deal with artificially throttling performance in games for no logical reason. In addition, it looks like the company is deliberately forcing its hardware to run at higher than recommended speeds in order to make it look better in the performance graphs of various benchmark tests.
I play graphically demanding games like CoD, Lost Light on S21. I have active cooling on my phone, otherwise it underclocks after half an hour of playing, or once it exceeds 45 degrees. It will be because of that first. I'm not advocating Samsung's move, but under normal circumstances it's simply not possible without cooling.
The company has already commented on the case and now we are just waiting for the SW update. Then it will probably be purely up to the user which setting they prefer.