Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra is an incredibly powerful phone — and there’s one area where it’s a cut above the rest

As we've come to expect from Samsung's flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is a top-tier handset in more ways than one — it's got a stunning design, it boasts cutting-edge AI features, it has an incredible camera array and it sports the best display of any handset on the market.

That said, you might be surprised to learn that the Galaxy S25 Ultra has one more area where it absolutely trounces the competition — gaming performance. It even bests Apple's iPhone 16 Pro Max in several benchmark results.

Oh yes, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is absolute beast when it comes to games, thanks in large part to its powerful new Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset — a Samsung-exclusive overclocked version of the standard 8 Elite SoC — and its integrated Qualcomm Adreno 830 GPU.

As someone who's always chasing the ultimate mobile gaming experience, from the best Android games, to the best phone controllers to complement them, I immediately started putting the Galaxy S25 Ultra through its paces once I got it in my hands.

What I found is that the Galaxy S25 Ultra significantly improves upon its predecessor, the Galaxy S24 Ultra — I just wasn't ready for how big of a difference the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy would make.

Ahead of the pack

In its Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark results, the Galaxy S25 Ultra achieved an impressive single-core score of 3106, putting it well ahead of the S24 Ultra, which scored 2136. Admittedly, its single-core score did not beat the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which still leads at 3429, however, the S25 Ultra's multi-core scores are another matter entirely.

In its multi-core results, the S25 trounced the competition with a score of 9763 — a gigantic 46.2% increase over the S24 Ultra, which achieved a multi-core score of 6675, and a 15.1% lead on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which scored 8479.

As for GPU-specific benchmarks, the S25 Ultra achieved an OpenCL score of 18041 — once again a substantial increase on the S24 Ultra, which scored 15255.

Unfortunately, we cannot directly compare this score with the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which uses an entirely difference graphics API called Metal. We can, however, discuss how the Samsung's flagship markedly outperformed its current Apple equivalent in 3DMark's all-important Steel Nomad Light benchmark, which indicates "how capable a smartphone is in terms of handling rasterization loads," as per the benchmark site Notebookcheck.

In our tests, the S25 Ultra scored 2548, with an average frame rate (fps) 18.88 — slightly under Notebookcheck's results of 2617 and 19.39 fps. Of course, the S25 Ultra performed 32% better than the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which scored 1922 and 14.2fps.

As for its AnTuTu 10 score, the S25 Ultra achieved an overall performance score of 2,209,231 in online benchmark tests, placing it behind a few other devices from manufacturers like Xiaomi and OnePlus. That said, it's worth noting that the S25 Ultra with 12GB of RAM was tested, and was only beaten by devices with 16GB of RAM. Samsung does make a Galaxy S25 Ultra with 16GB of RAM, however, it's only available in Korea, China and Taiwan.

Game on

High benchmark scores are great, but what really matters is how the Galaxy S25 Ultra performs with graphically intensive games. As a hardened Call of Duty Mobile player, I was keen to see how my favorite online shooter performed on Samsung's new flagship.

Given that the game is heavily optimized, I went in expecting great things, and the S25 Ultra did not disappoint — CoD Mobile plays a rock-solid 60fps with Graphic Quality and Frame Rate set to Max (unfortunately, switching toggling the latter to Ultra forces the game to drop the former to Medium, though I'm pretty sure this phone could handle it without breaking a sweat).

Next, I booted up my current mobile game obsession, the Top Gun-style dogfighting game Metalstorm, which sticks to 60fps with Visual Quality, Resolution Scale and Texture Quality all set to their maximum levels, and with real-time water reflections switched on.

Of course, Genshin Impact is known to be graphically taxing on Android devices, but even that ran smooth as silk on the S25 Ultra with Game Optimisation set to 'Performance' in Samsung's Gaming Hub.

During gameplay, I didn't notice a single hitch or dropped frame with all settings at their maximum — even while facing off against numerous enemies in large open-world areas. In fact, the only time the frame rate ever dropped below the Android version's maximum of 60fps was in menus or on loading screens.

A mobile gamer's verdict

During my time with Samsung's Galaxy S25 Ultra, I've found the new flagship to be nothing short of a gaming powerhouse. It not only offers a serious increase in performance over its predecessor, it also manages to best its rival, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, in a number of areas.

Of course, it doesn't even need to be the Ultra model — the standard Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus boast the same Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset, meaning you can expect the same level of performance across the entire lineup. That said, the S25 Ultra does offer a bigger display with a higher resolution, along with a larger battery, so you're an Android gamer looking for a handset that's as beastly as it is premium, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is it.

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