Exynos 2600 Beats Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in Key GPU Test

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Samsung’s Exynos 2600, expected to power the Galaxy S26 series, seems capable of delivering solid graphics performance thanks to the Xclipse 960 GPU. The chip has shown strong results in the In Vitro benchmark, beating Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. This shows that the Korean firm has made significant improvements in overall processing power, narrowing the gap with its key competitor.

Benchmark results show strong GPU performance for Exynos 2600

Developed by Basemark, the In Vitro ray tracing benchmark for mobile devices assesses GPU rendering performance. In the test, Exynos 2600’s Xclipse 960 GPU achieved 8,321 points. In comparison, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s Adreno 840 GPU achieved 7,649 points. This suggests the Exynos chip offers about 8.8% better GPU performance than Qualcomm’s offering.

Based on Arm v9.3 architecture, the Xclipse 960 GPU offers twice the computing performance of its predecessor, according to Samsung. As such, it delivers up to 50% performance improvement in ray tracing. Furthermore, Exynos 2600 supports Exynos Neural Super Sampling (ENSS), an AI-based solution that upscales resolution and generates frames.

On the CPU front, Exynos 2600 uses a 10-core tri-cluster configuration. The chip features one C1 Ultra Prime core at 3.8 GHz, three C1 Pro cores at 3.25 GHz, and six C1 Pro cores at 2.75 GHz. It uses an in-house 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process, which is more advanced than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s 3nm process.

A smaller node may also have played a key role in helping Samsung achieve a higher score in the GPU test than its main rival. Recent AI benchmarks show that the Exynos 2600 offers impressive machine-learning performance. In MLPerf Mobile v5.0 benchmarks, the chip outperformed the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in tasks such as language understanding and object detection.

We will see real-world performance when devices using the Exynos 2600 are released in the market. The chip could power the Galaxy S26 and S26+ (launching on February 25) in select markets, including Europe and the UK. Samsung could use the Qualcomm flagship chip for the Galaxy S26 Ultra globally.

Written by

Binay Konwar

Binay Konwar started his blogging journey in 2014 and has since written plenty of tech articles. At present, he is working as a News Writer at SammyGuru, covering everything about Samsung. He holds a Master's degree in Mathematics, but his real passion lies in tech and writing. In his free time, he enjoys playing chess and watching movies.

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