How Galaxy Became the Ultimate Gamer’s Smartphone

As the gaming world gathers at the Game Developers Conference to celebrate and discuss the latest and best innovations, learn more about Galaxy’s vision for creating the best mobile gaming smartphone on the market.

Since the days of the first Galaxy S, mobile gaming has transformed beyond recognition. The most popular games all used to be basic tap-and-swipe titles, but now mobile gaming offers so much more. As the mobile gaming market grows at 1.7 times the rate of the rest of the gaming world, innovation is in high demand.

The line between mobile gaming and PC or console gaming is blurring, and Samsung engineers have been working to obliterate it entirely. With the Galaxy S23, Samsung aimed to set a new standard for what a premium mobile device can do.

Well, mission accomplished.

With improved hardware, software, processing and more, the newest Galaxy smartphone comprehensively advances every aspect of the device. Galaxy has even optimized the games themselves through open collaboration with developers. The result: a world-class gaming experience with performance elevated in every area.
 

Creating the Ultimate Gamer’s Smartphone
At the heart of the Galaxy S23 series is the Snapdragon^® 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform for Galaxy. As the most powerful chipset ever in a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, it’s what gives gamers an edge they won’t find on other smartphones. It makes graphics smoother, with more stable frame rates. And it’s more power-efficient compared to previous models.

That’s increasingly important as mobile games become more demanding. Graphics on mobile titles are getting closer to what’s possible at home. Processors have more 3D rendering challenges. More textures and objects in a scene, plus higher frame rates and increasing resolutions.

The Galaxy S23 handles all this with ease. Samsung worked closely with Qualcomm to optimize the chipset for Galaxy. When development began, the priority was to ensure early GPU compatibility, reliability and optimized performance.

The result is a GPU about 41% faster and designed to keep up with the demands of power users. The new CPU structure also boosts the processing abilities of Galaxy S23 series by about 30% compared to the Galaxy S22 series.
 

Supporting all this is a key innovation empowering our gaming mission: Galaxy’s vapor cooling chamber. An overheated chipset may have to limit resources to protect both the user and the device. This causes game performance downgrades such as framerate drops. The vapor cooling chamber, made larger on the Galaxy S23 Ultra and brought to the S23+ and S23 models, reinforces gaming performance as it dissipates heat.

All these advancements help address one of the latest gaming challenges – cross-platform gaming. This is when mobile, console and desktop versions of a game need to share data across devices. This results in higher CPU and GPU loads than conventional games, which is a lot to handle. Good resource management is critical, as is the intelligence to balance performance and power.

Making the Future of Gaming More Mobile
To excel at handling increasingly demanding workloads, a smartphone needs excellent hardware and software — and precise optimization to get the most out of both.

The Galaxy S23 delivers the fastest mobile graphics of any Galaxy device. But more importantly, it can now sustain intense gaming performance for longer periods of time than on previous the S series. This was one of the biggest gaps between static and mobile gaming, and Galaxy is closing it.

Snapdragon^® 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform for Galaxy is also designed to support new technologies such as ray tracing. Capable of handling light source effects such as shadows and reflection, the Galaxy S23 series could serve as the first platform for game developers to apply ray tracing effects on mainstream mobile games. But Samsung is not just ahead of the industry now. Engineers are already working on more future-ready advancements so Galaxy smartphones can handle even more complex effects.

While plenty of smartphones can play games well on the go, Galaxy is striving for something extraordinary. Something like the Galaxy S23 series. Or as we like to think of it, the ultimate gamer’s smartphone — that’s only going to keep getting better.

To dive deeper into Galaxy’s future-ready gaming innovations, including ray tracing, read the latest from developers here.



*Snapdragon is a trademark or registered trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated. Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.