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Gaming on the Galaxy S22 Ultra: An In-Depth Review
(Upbeat music) All right, guys. I apologize for the wait, but it’s finally here: gaming on the Galaxy S22 Ultra, or the new 22 Ultra, whatever you want to call it. If you’re joining us for the first time, we do a lot of gaming videos on this channel. This time, we’re checking out the S22 Ultra and going over a ton of things about the device.
Now, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and notification icon. Also, I want to give a big shout-out to our sponsor for this video, Spigen. You guys know I’ve been using their products for a while. They’ve got a brand new case right here, which we’ll talk about later in this video. Of course, they also offer lots of cool chargers that you can definitely use for your 22 Ultra, because Samsung doesn’t provide one.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra: A Gaming Beast
All right, so the S22 Ultra is here. It’s a beast with a massive 6.8-inch display. It’s absolutely gorgeous with a Super AMOLED 2X display. Not sure why they call it that, but I like the fact that this display is super responsive with a 120 Hertz refresh rate. Very fast, very responsive, and it’s something that you can play at the highest resolution at 120 Hertz. I’m doing that in this gameplay video in terms of full performance.
Now, this is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the version in the U.S. If you’re in the UK or certain parts of the world, you’ll be getting the Exynos 2200, which I don’t have yet. But trust me, once I get it, I will be doing a gaming comparison between the two to see performance.
Benchmark Scores
Some of you are going, “Okay, what about benchmarks?” Again, I don’t care about benchmarks, but here you go. Here’s your CPU benchmark, sorry, your compute benchmark scores: OpenCL score of 5,873. You can see how it compares to Exynos from last year. It is actually slightly behind. Then, if you go to CPU scores, you can see it’s 1,216 single-core and 3,429 multi-core. Better than Exynos last year, better than the Exynos again for multi-core last year. So for benchmark guys, that is what you get.
Gaming Performance
But look, I’m here to talk about gaming and gaming performance, and we’re going to be checking out a ton of games here. You can see the games we’ll be playing throughout this whole session. Honestly, I have to say that the gaming experience was really fluid and smooth. I liked what I got from the gaming experience altogether, but I will say this, and I’m going to put it out there right now: temperatures ran a little higher than expected, which actually brings me to, of course, the Spigen case I was talking about.
Spigen Cryo Armor Case
This is the Cryo Armor case. Now, why I like this case and why it actually helped with the temperatures, which we’ll be talking about, is the fact that it has a mixture of silicon and graphite. So it helps cool the device a little better, but it’s not just that. You can see the design here at the back. You can see those blue colors. They’ve got vents to allow heat dissipation much better, so your device doesn’t run warm, especially if you have a case, because we all have cases on our devices. I like the fact that it actually ran just a little bit cooler, allowing me to enjoy my gameplay sessions a little bit better. This is an awesome case, retailing for $21.99. Definitely check it out.
Temperature Management
Also, this is something very needed because those temperatures went up to 106 degrees. Now, that might not be too bad because some other devices have run definitely warmer, and it is cooler than last year, but it was something that I noticed. Now, this didn’t happen with every single game, and I’ll mention the games that actually ran those temperatures.
Call of Duty Mobile
The very first game is “Call of Duty Mobile.” We, of course, played it a couple of times. I used GameBench Pro to measure the benchmarks. As you can see, I’ve got three gaming sessions here. All 60 FPS in terms of frame rates. Going back to the next one, you can see the RAM usage. We used about 1,034 megabits of RAM, and GPU usage was about 37%. Frame rate was 59 frames per second in this situation, 89% of the time. But for the rest, it was 60 FPS, 100% of the time. So it ran “Call of Duty Mobile” very well.
Critical Ops
Now, let’s go over to another game somebody asked for. This is actually called “Critical Ops.” Now, I do like this game. It’s actually fun to play. In terms of the benchmarks, it did pretty well. It did about 60 frames per second steady, no issues whatsoever. Although it’s not here on this tool, you can see it here on screen that it ran those benchmarks very well. This is an awesome game to play, honestly. Thanks for the heads up on that game.
PUBG Mobile
Now, you guys, of course, want to see “PUBG Mobile.” Somebody asked me to play “PUBG Mobile” with a GFX tool. I just didn’t have enough time, guys. But “PUBG Mobile,” I did put in a ton of hours and a lot of sessions into the gameplay. Playing smooth extreme a couple of times here, we started off with 58 frames per second, and then it kind of just improved and got better. We got 60 FPS as well. We got another 60 FPS session here, and you can see the RAM usage: 442, GPU: 28. It’s not really GPU intensive, and you can see the RAM usage is still very similar across the board. Now, the one thing I did notice at smooth extreme is that the FPS stayed at 60 frames per second for 100%, and your battery usage was about 26% per hour. We’ll get to the battery in a second.
Ultra HD Ultra
Now, also playing in ultra HD ultra 40 frames per second, as you would expect, RAM usage is also similar. GPU usage was much higher because, of course, it’s more graphically intensive at this point. Same thing with just another session as well. You can see the GPU usage, and of course, the battery increased in usage to 37% per hour, which means you’re going to be using more battery juice if playing at smooth extreme but still solid overall. So those games handled pretty well.
Other Games
Before I get to “Genshin Impact,” I’ve got a couple of other games to showcase. So we’ve got “Lost Light.” Now, “Lost Light” was a fun game, and it actually played really well. You can see it also had a higher GPU usage at 57 frames per second. You can see the graphics of this game. It looks pretty nice. You can see it’s a little bit more graphically intensive. CPU, not so much. RAM is much higher at 1,203 megabits of RAM usage and 60 frames per second. It used that for about 96% of the time, so that was actually pretty good. Battery consumption was actually decent at 24% per hour. So “Lost Light,” a fun game to actually check out right there.
Black Desert Mobile
So, let’s get to the big hitters in terms of performance and performance usage. There is “Black Desert Mobile.” Now, this game here, I couldn’t get the GPU or RAM usage of it, but I was running about 43 frames a second at the maximum resolution for it. I played for 22 minutes and four seconds, basically. The game is intense. There’s a lot of particles on screen. It does a lot of stuff, so you can see the kind of performance you get from it. But I will say this, though, that yes, even though it ran pretty well, I wanted to get to a stable frame rate of about hopefully 60, but it stayed at 45 and was kind of locked between 43 and 45. In terms of frame rates, it sat at 43 for 92%, and the battery usage is about 24% for the hour or so of use. So that is actually “Black Desert,” a fun game to play and one that uses a lot of juice from the device, if you will.
Genshin Impact
Now, “Genshin Impact.” “Genshin” was very, very interesting. I couldn’t actually record it off the device, so I connected to my PC and ran “Genshin Impact.” Now, you know how “Genshin” is. Using it at max settings, this game can be very, very intensive to play. This is where we saw some very interesting numbers. I was getting 42 frames per second. I played for about 20 minutes in one of the gameplay sessions, and I got 42 frames per second, which I was like, that’s not good. That’s actually worse than last year. So I went back, took my Galaxy S21 Ultra. Also, we have a Spigen case, but this is the device right here. I took my S21 Ultra and played the same game as well, and I got similar results. I was going, “Okay, what’s going on?” So honestly, that is what I got for “Genshin Impact” on the S22 Ultra. It’s a bit disappointing. I’m hoping because the device is not out yet, it needs an update because my earlier numbers from last year with the S21 Ultra were much higher in the 50s range. Now I’m seeing things in the 40s, low 40s, which is not really good. So that is something that hopefully an update will fix because I think performance-wise, it should be able to actually hit those marks.
Battery Usage
When it comes to battery use and battery drainage, from the games we saw, it told us roughly around 24 to about 25% battery loss within an hour, at least just what GameBench Pro told us. But in my actual use case, I got closer to about 15% power, which is actually pretty good. It showcases that this processor does a really good job at just battery regulation, especially while gaming for a long period of time. I had a good session for about two hours and saw about 15% per hour, getting to about 30%. Sometimes it was even less, about maybe 28% in terms of battery loss. So that’s actually pretty good because, as you know, the S22 Ultra doesn’t come with a charger, and if you need to charge your device, that’s going to be something you definitely need if you’re playing for long periods of time.
Spigen PowerArc Charger
Thankfully, as I mentioned earlier, Spigen does have a charger. This is the Spigen PowerArc charger. What I like about it, it’s a 45-watt charger. It comes with a braided cable, and of course, it’s USB Type-C. It’s a PD charger. It will support the fast charging you need on your Galaxy device. Honestly, it’s a lifesaver since there are no more chargers, especially with Samsung increasing the charging wattage, which you would think they would provide a charger for you.
Game Streaming Services
Anyway, you guys are probably asking, what about game streaming services? Yes, I did test out Xbox Game Pass, and it played well. As you would expect, it should. I did try it over 5G with T-Mobile and Verizon, and it handled pretty well on both carrier networks with no issues whatsoever. Locked to 60 frames per second, so that’s actually pretty consistent. I also used the GameSir X2 USB-C, which is a USB-C controller. Love that. Works pretty well for it too. Also works well for emulators. I actually played a Dreamcast emulator, played “Marvel vs Capcom,” and that worked well with no issues as well. So if you’re looking to play emulators on your S22 Ultra, you should have no issues with it. The processor can handle things pretty well.
Final Thoughts
I think when you look at this device overall in terms of gaming features, it will handle almost everything. When I say almost everything, we saw that hiccup with “Genshin Impact,” where it just didn’t give us numbers that I expected to see. So hopefully, that is something that can be patched with a software update because, of course, this device is not available on the market yet. So that’s something to put as a little caveat there. But overall, temperatures were in line with what I expected, and I think this is going to be a device that a lot of people will love to use for their day-to-day gaming.
Now, if you guys have any questions or comments about some of the games, the accessories, or even the Spigen Cryo Armor case, as well as the Spigen PowerArc charger, let me know. Definitely use the links down below to pick them up, as well as your own Galaxy S22 Ultra or any Galaxy S device. We have links for you guys down below. This is Thunder E, saying thank you and always enjoy your entertainment.
