It's no mystery that the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a powerhouse that has a set of impressive hardware components under the hood, but apparently, the handset heats up pretty quickly, causing the processor to be incapable of delivering the expected performance in gaming.
For the record, the current Samsung flagship comes in two variants: one with the home-built Exynos 8890 and another with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820.
Now, the Exynos model may have won on a couple of fronts in a speed test, but in terms of graphic processing, the Snapdragon version outdid the other contestant by as much as 32 percent, according to Antutu.
At this point, things already don't look all that great for the Exynos, and the situation just gets worse moving forward.
The folks over at Nordic Hardware put the Exynos-powered Galaxy S7 to the test, finding out that the smartphone loses 25 percent worth of performance after 15 minutes of gaming. In other words, the device starts to throttle after a couple of minutes of heavy use, which means that the processor tones down the clock speed when heat is building up, sacrificing performance.
The Exynos 8890 is made up of an octa-core setup, sporting four of the smartphone maker's 2.3 GHz Mongoose cores and another four 1.6 GHz Cortex-A53 cores. Needless to say, the Mongoose tops the Cortex-A53 when it comes to performance, and that means its design could be the cause of the issue.
However, that's not the end of the bad news, as the testers discovered that overheating is not the problem. The findings reveal that on three rounds of testing at 38 degrees, the performance continued to gradually dip, suggesting that it's an inherent issue that lies in the design of the chipset itself.
Of course, the Exynos shouldn't shoulder all the blame, as ARM Mali-T880 MP12 GPU plays a part in this department as well.
To boil things down, it's probably a good idea for mobile gamers to think twice before getting their hands on a Galaxy S7, unless they're sure that it's packing a Snapdragon 820 inside, which is a bit difficult to determine nowadays.
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns | Flickr
