Samsung's new Galaxy S22, S22+, and S22 Ultra may pack some of the fastest hardware you can get right now, but you might not actually be able to enjoy that benefit when playing games or other popular apps. According to Geekbench developer John Poole, and confirmed in our own testing, the Galaxy S22 series and earlier Samsung phones throttle performance severely when playing certain popular game titles, like Genshin Impact, and we've got the numbers to back it up.

A list of over 10,000 apps that have individual performance tunings has been making the rounds, though we are unable to verify its authenticity — in our own software digging, the list seems to be remotely updateable, and it's proving hard to track down. It reportedly includes both games and non-games like TikTok, Genshin Impact, Netflix, and even Samsung's stock launcher.

It's also not your usual throttling. So far as Android Police's Max Weinbach can tell digging into some of the code that appears to control it, it's incredibly sophisticated, balancing multiple parameters like temperature, expected battery level at different times, CPU speed, and predicted FPS benefits when determining what sorts of resources a given game gets. This tuning likely varies from app to app and game to game, so the benchmark numbers you see reported here and elsewhere may not be accurate to all circumstances.

Testing with modified versions of Geekbench meant to spoof the Genshin Impact package name (so the system sees the app as Genshin Impact and loads its performance profile), we can confirm that performance is significantly reduced on the Galaxy S22+, with a loss of around 45% in single-core performance and around 28% in multi-core performance. Checking CPU frequencies while tests are being run in both circumstances indicates reduced clock speeds.

Comparing GPU performance is a little harder, but Geekbench GPU compute performance also fell dramatically, by 54-58% in our testing between the standard and Genshin-spoofing Geekbench apps. Those numbers won't be included for all models in our table below, as supported methods for the benchmark vary from device to device.

We're updating this table with more devices over time, check back soon. It seems that Samsung devices going back multiple generations may be affected.

This extended to older Samsung devices, too, with the Galaxy Z Fold3 (an $1,800 flagship phone) throttling performance in a similar vein, though not as badly. We observed a 28% fall in single-core performance and a 23% drop in multi-core performance.

Reports indicate a wide variety of Samsung devices are affected. John Poole of Geekbench tested an Exynos version of the Galaxy S10 and a Snapdragon Galaxy S22 as well.

Adjusting Game Booster profile settings on the devices we tested could not restore the lost performance. The Galaxy S22 and some other Samsung phones have additional performance profile settings in the Battery section of settings as well, but changing that profile to its maximum setting had no effect on our results — they actually got slightly worse.

In comparison, the Pixel 6 Pro's Geekbench scores remained identical within a very small margin of error across both the standard Geekbench app and a version that used the Genshin Impact package name. Pixels don't seem to throttle performance based on the app that's running.

We contacted Samsung for comment regarding this issue yesterday, but the company has yet to provide a statement (update below). However, one is making the rounds on Twitter in Korean, claiming that the company may yet change how its game optimizing features work with a more truly performance-prioritizing mode.