Samsung is known to use a two-chip strategy on its flaghsip Galaxy S handsets. Last year was an exception in this regard due to the fiery Snapdragon 810 chipset, but with Qualcomm back on track this year, the company has launched two variants of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge this year: one powered by a  Snapdragon 820 chipset and another by its own Exynos 8890 chipset.

Both chipsets are widely different from each other: the Snapdragon 820 chip from Qualcomm is a quad-core chip that uses the company’s custom Kyro 64-bit cores, while the Exynos 8890 is an octa-core chip that features Samsung’s own custom M1 ARM cores. On the GPU front, the Snapdragon 820 comes with an Adreno 530 GPU, while Samsung’s SoC uses a GPU cluster from ARM’s Mali team.

In CPU performance, both chipsets are almost equally matched. The Exynos 8890 is faster in certain benchmarks because of its higher clock speed and due to the fact that it has more processing cores available. When it comes to GPU performance though, the Exynos 8890 chipset is far behind the Adreno 530 GPU of the Snapdragon 820. The difference in certain benchmarks can be as high as up to 32%, which is pretty staggering and can be easily felt in certain demanding games.

There has always been a gap in the GPU performance of Samsung’s Exynos chipsets and Qualcomm’s Adreno chipset. However, over the years, one would have expected that Samsung would have caught up with Qualcomm in this department, but that is not the case.

Considering that Samsung is launching the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge with an Exynos 8890 chipset in almost all parts of the world, except for the United States, don’t go around boasting about the GPU performance of the handset to your friends just by looking at the benchmarks. The Galaxy S7 will be slower than the LG G5, HTC One M10 and other Snapdragon 820 devices that will be launched later this year in GPU bound situations.

Are you bummed that Samsung did not launch the Snapdragon 820 variant of the Galaxy S7 in your country?