With the recent case regarding Samsung’s Game Optimizing Service, also known as GOS for short, the company pushed out a new update to give us the option to unlock the phone to its full potential. That update arrived to my personal unit of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
I was curious to find out – did this update finally unlocks the performance that we all desire? Spoiler alert: it did.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the entire process and our testing methodology. We’re breaking this into sections in accordance with the video, which we highly recommend you watch instead of reading.
Downloading the update
Yeah, the new update is available for all Galaxy S22 Ultra phones (maybe not immediately) and this is the changelog of the update.
Just download the update and apply it.
Enabling GPU Watch
For Samsung phones, our tool of choice is GPU Watch. It is a much better tool than Perf Z as it offers a lot more crucial information like the render resolution, the FPS, and also the CPU and GPU utilization in a timeline graph.
To enable it, we’ll have to turn on Developer Options and find the GPU Watch option, then enable it. You can customize it if you want to, but I’ll leave it in default. We talked about GPU Watch vs Perf Z a little more extensively in this video.
Once we’ve done that, we can go into Genshin Impact and do our first test.
Test #1 – with new update, everything else in default
With Genshin Impact at the highest graphical setting at 60fps mode, we got quite consistent 60fps throughout the gameplay. However, as reported by the GPU Watch applet, the render resolution is only at about 1372×640.
The low render resolution is not ideal since it will appear jaggy in certain areas, so I want to increase that. To do that, we need to download something else.
Install Game Plugins and Game Booster Plus
I have no idea why Samsung made it so complicated by splitting this setting into a few different applets. We’ll have to download Game Plugins and within Game Plugins, we can select and download Game Boost Plus.
Inside Game Booster Plus, we use these settings to make the render resolution go higher.
Once we done that, we can restart Genshin Impact and we can see the render resolution goes up to 1853×864.
Test #2 – after increasing the render resolution
It is here that we can see the effects of thermal throttling. The Galaxy S22 Ultra with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 manages to only output about 45fps in the city within the game, which is already quite good in itself but we still haven’t enabled the upper thermal limit.
Enabling the “alternate game performance management” setting
Within the latest update for the Galaxy S22 Ultra, we have this new option within the Game Launch app. It’s nested under the “Labs” menu, so it is rather experiment as of now.
After enabling this new option, we restarted Genshin Impact once again to see that…
Test #3 – performance increased?
Yes to did! Quite a lot too, actually. We got about 50-55fps at the same area as before, which is a huge boost. But, that’s not enough. We continued playing the game for another additional half an hour or so to see if there are any increments to the thermals.
And it did. Throughout our gameplay, it went up to about 48°C
The amazing thing is, the phone is only a little bit warm. Only the frame of the phone got a bit hotter. While the thermal camera reported around 48°C, the reading might be a little off since the frame has a reflective surface.
Conclusion
I think Samsung did a great job here. They managed to give us an update regarding the situation this quickly and it gave the phone a huge boost in performance. Even though Samsung did warn us that enabling the “alternate game performance management” option will result in heating, the temperatures are well-managed. Much better than the other phone that we’ve tested that is also equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
However, I think we can push the performance to go even higher. The CPU utilization sits around 80% most of the time while the GPU is always below 15% utilization. I believe that in time, when Samsung further optimizes the “alternate game performance management” option, the Galaxy S22 Ultra can push for even higher performance.
However, this kind of tinkering only matters to smartphone gamers. For everyone else, this new option wouldn’t make any difference.
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