Samsung's days of being pushed around by Apple - at least when it comes to phone performance - may be over. As part of our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra hands-on test, we have benchmark results and they show that Apple's top-of-the-line iPhone may have met their match in Samsung's latest flagship phone.

Past Galaxy S benchmarks have followed a familiar pattern - Samsung phones posting the best numbers of any Android device but lagging far behind the iPhone and its Apple-designed A-series chip. However, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, breaks this pattern.

In some key performance tests, the Galaxy S24 Ultra fares better than Apple's best-performing phone, the iPhone 15 Pro. iPhone with the A17 Pro is still the leader in other areas, but this battle of the best phones is really close! ...

Good news for the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus, at least in North America. These phones are also powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so we can expect similar numbers as the Ultra. (In other regions, the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus have the Exynos 2400 system-on-chip, and it remains to be seen how these phones will perform.)

For Apple, these results may be a wake-up call of sorts: while the iPhone 15 Pro model is still a very fast phone and completed real-world tasks much faster than the Galaxy S24 Ultra in our tests, Apple is no longer a mobile devices and cannot claim to be building an undisputed speed champion among devices.

Let's dig deeper into the numbers of the Galaxy S24 Ultra's benchmark results.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Galaxy S24 Ultra deserves a lot of credit for the phone's high performance. However, it is helped by the fact that Samsung has packed 12GB of memory into that phone. By contrast, the iPhone 15 Pro uses 8GB of RAM. (This figure was obtained from a disassembly of the phone; Apple does not list the memory contained in the device.)

Let's take a look at other top smartphones that the Galaxy S24 Ultra competes with and what's inside the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which replaces the Galaxy S23 Ultra in Samsung's lineup.

Geekbench is split in its judgment between Samsung and Apple devices. However, given that Apple has traditionally dominated this overall performance test, Samsung will be pleased that its phone came out on top in one area.

In the Geekbench 6 single-core test, the iPhone 15's result of 2,890 was solidly ahead of the Galaxy S24 Ultra's score of 2,300, as usual.The Ultra's single-core results are a result of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 system-on-chip, which is about 10% better than the Galaxy S23 Ultra.

In Geekbench 6 multi-core tests, the Galaxy S24 Ultra showed significant performance gains. The Samsung phone recorded a score of 7,249, beating the iPhone 15 Pro's result of 7,194 (interestingly, the iPhone 15 Pro Max recorded a lower Geekbench score than the Pro model). While this gap isn't as large as you'd notice when running the phones side-by-side, it's a big step forward for Samsung to even be in the same ballpark as Apple, let alone narrowly ahead.

Apple's cheaper flagships rely on the A16 Bionic, and the iPhone 15 Plus also beat the Galaxy S24 Ultra's single-core results, but fell behind Samsung's new phone in multi-core tests.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro is another Android device with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 silicon, but its single-core and multi-core Geekbench results (1,339 and 6,543 respectively) were clearly inferior to the Galaxy S24 Ultra's The S24 Ultra's results were clearly inferior to those of the Galaxy S24 Ultra. This is presumably because the version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the S24 Ultra is overclocked, as was the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 from last year.

3DMark's Wild Life Unlimited test gives an idea of how the chipset's GPU performs by running graphically intensive tests and calculating the number of frames per second each terminal generates The higher the FPS, the better, the better the score.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra simply dominates the competition here. When it debuted last year, the Galaxy S23 Ultra rode the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU improvements to Wild Life results that outperformed many other phones, including some iPhones. The very same thing happened with the upgraded Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The S24 Ultra's Wild Life Unlimited score of 123.5 fps is a 31% improvement over the iPhone 15 Pro's 94.3 fps result. It is also better than the 110.1 fps result of the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, a gaming-focused device.

We perform real-world testing when we benchmark using Adobe Premiere Rush. We use the app to transcode 4K video clips to 1080p and time the results. The iPhone usually comes out on top in these tests, but that is no different for the other performance gains achieved by the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The S24 Ultra took an average of 42 seconds to transcode a video. This is 3 seconds slower than last year's Galaxy S23 Ultra time; we were unable to run the test on the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro because Premiere Rush would crash after a few seconds of operation.

Needless to say, the iPhone is still king here, whether it is the Pro model with the A17 Pro (25.5 seconds) or the model with the A16 Bionic (24.5 seconds on the iPhone 15 Plus). 24.5 seconds, making Apple's phone a fairly consistent performer in this test.

Even if the video transcoding results were lackluster, the Galaxy S24 Ultra recorded the best performance of any Android phone we have seen.

Combine this good benchmark news with the Galaxy S24 Ultra's stellar battery life results (only two Asus gaming phones ranked higher than the S24 Ultra in our best smartphone battery life list), and it's clear that Samsung's hardware in the S24 lineup has been a big hit. Whatever you may think about Samsung's hardware improvements in the S24 lineup, it's clear that the upgrade to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a significant change.

And now the ball is in Apple's court as to how it will respond with the chip that will power the iPhone 16 models this fall. According to reports, Apple will use the new A18 chipset in each model, and the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will have a more powerful version.