Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra (Snapdragon 865) Quick Performance Preview: Impressive

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Samsung's Galaxy S20 series phones have been available since last Friday in markets such as the US. And earlier this week we also finally received a unit, in the form of a North American, Snapdragon 865-based Galaxy S20 Ultra. While our review is already underway, we’re also still waiting for public availability in Europe in order to get our hands on our Rest of World, Exynos 990 variant, so that we can take a comprehensive look at both variants of the S20 series. As we've seen in previous years, there have been some pretty significant differences between the Snapdragon and Exynos models at times, thanks to the SoC selection impacting everything from performance to image processing.

But first things first: since we have a bit of a lead time with the Snapdragon unit, we wanted to at least publish the performance figures for this model ahead of the full review, to temporarily satisfy everyone’s curiosity on at least this aspect of the phone.

System Performance

System performance of the new Galaxy S20 Ultra is an interesting topic, as there are several new aspects to this year’s flagship phone. The one big difference that trumps every other addition is the fact that Samsung has been able to integrate a new 120Hz refresh rate display. This change alone puts the new S20 series far ahead of other mainstream phones in the market, and the new experience is fantastic.

Besides the new higher refresh rate screen, we’re also naturally seeing the upgrade to newer generation SoCs. In this first instance, we’re testing the Snapdragon 865 variant of the Galaxy S20 Ultra. For their latest flagship SoC, Qualcomm adopted the new Cortex-A77 CPU cores, promising to bring 20-25% higher performance over its predecessor.

Finally, we do have to remember that Samsung has a “performance” feature in its battery settings, which increases the aggressiveness of the scheduler to fully unlock the performance of the phone. Usually we test Samsung phones with this option enabled, both in our performance as well as battery life testing.

Starting off with our usual system performance tests, these evaluations are highly sensitive to the responsiveness of the phone, which is tied to the aggressiveness of the DVFS and scheduler of the CPUs. For the Galaxy S20 Ultra, we have four score combinations, showcasing the 60 and 120Hz modes, as well as the “High Performance” mode on or off.

The web browsing test in PCMark is quite sensitive to performance responsiveness, and in this regard, the new Snapdragon 865 doesn’t disappoint. Switching between the 60 and 120Hz modes, we see a notable increase in fluidity, and this is picked up by the benchmark.

At the highest performing settings, the new Galaxy S20 Ultra even outperforms the QRD865 platform that we tested back in December. This was quite surprising, as I wasn't expecting commercial devices to ship with as aggressive settings as that phone’s “Performance Mode”, which did seem tad aggressive.

The video editing test has largely lost its performance scaling usefulness, but still is able to pick up the new 120Hz mode of the S20U, representing a jump ahead of any other phone in the market.

The writing sub-test is very important in terms of being a representation of every-day snappiness of a phone, and the Galaxy S20 Ultra here tops the charts, falling in line with the best scores from the QRD865 as well as now slightly leaping ahead of Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro.

The photo editing test similarly is scaling up in performance across the different setting configurations, showcasing fantastic performance.

The data manipulation score also seemingly is tied to the framerate achieved during the test, and the 120Hz mode of the S20U leads all other devices.

In the overall results, no matter what setting you’re using, the Galaxy S20 Ultra with the Snapdragon 865 tops all other commercially available Android phones out there, and at its peak settings, it even outperforms the QRD865 in its aggressive performance mode.

I did some quick testing of the DVFS aggressiveness between the optimized and performance modes, and was surprised to see no difference in the resulting scaling behavior. This means that the performance differences must arrive from the overall more aggressive scheduling, rather than scaling up to higher frequencies sooner. We’ll go over this aspect in more detail in the full review.
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