For its latest flagship phones, Samsung followed an old, yet familiar strategy. Depending on where. you live, you’ll get either a Snapdragon or Exynos powered Galaxy S24. This is a 180-degree change from last year’s Galaxy S23 lineup, which all ran the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chips — regardless of the market.
We’ve already revealed the incredible muscle power brought forth by Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line silicon after we put the Galaxy S24 Ultra through our benchmark testing, but we’ve only managed to secure an Exynos 2400 equipped S24 just recently. It’s important to know if there are any performance trade-offs with Sammy choosing to go with its in-house chip. There’s no confirmed reason on why Samsung went back to this approach, but it could all be a matter of cost.
Regardless, we ran the usual suite of benchmark tests on the Exynos 2400-equipped version of the Galaxy S24. It’s the same processor that’s used with the Galaxy S24 Plus in some markets abroad. For the rest of us in the U.S., there’s nothing to worry about because all three models of the S24 are powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Geekbench 6 starts off our performance benchmark testing, and even though we ran the same single and multi-core tests three times on both phones to get an average, the Exnynos 2400-powered S24 can’t keep up with its Snapdragon counterpart. It scores an average of 2,147 and 6,738 respectively for its single and multi-core tests, versus the 2,235 and 6,922 scores of its sibling. These results might not look awfully different, but it simply shows the mightier punch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Moving onto 3DMark’s Wild Life Original Unlimited test that benchmarks the GPU of the phones, we again see how the Snapdragon delivers smoother frame rates with its graphics processing. While the 91.19 fps rate of the Exynos 2400 is good in its own right, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 blows it out of the water with its high 120.44 fps frame rate.
When gaming is contingent on latency and how quickly graphically intensive frames are generated, it’s a big enough disparity that could be the difference between you hitting or missing the mark in your favorite first-person shooter.
For ray tracing performance, we ran 3DMark’s Solar Bay Unlimited — and the results are no different with this GPU focused test. The Exynos 2400 hits an average frame rate of 31.33 fps, whereas the Snapdragon powered S24 gets a slight boost at 33.54 fps. These scores are well above average, and while the Exynos 2400 doesn’t reach the same frame rate, we don’t think there would be much of a difference when playing games that support ray tracing like Diablo Immortal.
When it comes to everyday processes on our phones, Crossmark tests the overall system performance and system responsiveness. The overall score favors the Snapdragon at 1,389, but the Exynos 2400 isn’t too far behind with its 1,239 overall score. We’re less particular about this test because it’s rare for a flagship phone to exhibit unresponsive operations for basic stuff like navigating across the interface or running apps.
And finally there’s WebXPRT 4, which runs various scripts in the browser to measure its performance. Once again the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powered S24 producing the better score of 194. Meanwhile, the Exynos 2400 isn’t too far behind at 183.
Power efficiency is the missing link
All of these benchmark tests prove there’s no comparison here: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is simply better than the Exynos 2400. However, what fascinated us the most in testing out all three versions of the Snapdragon powered Galaxy S24 is the impressive power efficiency of the chip. In fact, the Galaxy S24 Plus and S24 Ultra land a spot in our best phone battery life list — with each reaching an absurd 16+ hours on our battery benchmark tests.
These long lasting results aren’t just good, they’re giant leaps compared to last year’s phones. While the Exynos 2400 trails in every CPU and GPU test we ran on the S24, it could redeem itself if it’s able to post better battery life results. If it doesn’t, then it simply affirms that Qualcomm has reached a new plateau with no equal to match it.
