S26 Ultra consistently faster than Exynos
Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra with its Snapdragon chip is on its way to the first customers, along with the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus, which run the Exynos chip instead. We have started testing all three phones and can report how the performance differs between the different models and the chip.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is consistently faster than its two sister models. We can ascertain this by comparing several performance measurements of all three units.
With the S26 series, Samsung uses different chips in the different models. We have experienced that before. For the S25 series last year, Samsung used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon in the entire range of phones, but this year they return to the strategy of the Ultra getting Snapdragon and the other two using Exynos.
Samsung themselves are tight-lipped about the differences and always have been. Instead, they usually say that the chip used, regardless of which one it is, meets the company’s high requirements and provides an excellent user experience. Nevertheless, we can perhaps guess that Ultra, which is the flagship of the trio, will have the sharpest chip.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra features the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, which is a slightly adapted version of the chip found in other Android manufacturers’ latest flagships. The S26 and S26 Plus, on the other hand, have Samsung’s proprietary Exynos 2600, where Samsung is said to have made great progress compared to previous years.
As we see in the comparison, the Galaxy S26 Ultra consistently gets better numbers than the phones with the Exynos chip. The various tests do not agree on the graphics performance (GPU), Antutu thinks Ultra with its Snapdragon is more powerful, but Geekbench thinks the opposite, so if Exynos surpasses Snapdragon in any area, it is precisely in graphics performance.
Benchmark Samsung Galaxy S26 series (Ultra with Snapdragon, S26 and S26 Plus with Exynos)
Samsung Galaxy S26 | Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus | Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra | |
| Antutu 11 | |||
| Total | 2863490 | 3099426 | 3684075 |
| CPU | 969030 | 1029757 | 1077800 |
| GPU | 1050267 | 1183539 | 1503288 |
| MEM | 381431 | 389492 | 393436 |
| UX | 462762 | 496638 | 709551 |
| Geekbench 6: Single-core | 3116 | 3096 | 3582 |
| Geekbench 6: Multi-core | 10267 | 10656 | 10929 |
| Geekbench 6: GPU | 25071 | 24881 | 23913 |
| 3Dmark Wild Life Stress Best | 20670 | 19264 | 27693 |
| 3Dmark Wild Life Stress Lowest | 11522 | 11184 | 14395 |
| Google Octane | 58364 | 60397 | 94620 |
| Jetstream 2 | 229,588 | 205,078 | 396,111 |
During these initial tests, we have also not noticed any major problems with overheating so that the chip is therefore forced to throttle the capacity under longer-term performance loads as seen in 3Dmark’s stress test.
An early evaluation can therefore point to the fact that Samsung with the Exynos 2600 is on the right track in development and the company said early in March that in the future they want to use their own Exynos chips in the entire product family and thus abandon Snapdragon.