Samsung followed a long familiar strategy for its latest flagship phone. Depending on where you live, you can get either a Snapdragon- or Exynos-powered Galaxy S24. This was a 180-degree change from last year's Galaxy S23 lineup, where all Galaxy chips, regardless of market, were powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

We have already revealed the tremendous muscle power of Qualcomm's top-of-the-line silicon after putting the Galaxy S24 Ultra through our benchmark tests, but only recently have we been able to secure an S24 with an Exynos 2400. It is important to know if there are any performance trade-offs for Sammy to adopt its own chips. There is no confirmation as to why Samsung has returned to this approach, but it may all be a matter of cost.

Anyway, we ran the usual group of benchmark tests on the Exynos 2400-powered version of the Galaxy S24. This is the same processor used in the Galaxy S24 Plus in some foreign markets. in Geekbench 6, we started a performance benchmark test and ran the same single-core and multi-core tests on both models three times to get an average, and the Exynos 2400 equipped S24 could not keep up with the Snapdragon-equipped S24. The average scores for the single-core and multi-core tests were 2,147 and 6,738, respectively, falling short of its sibling's 2,235 and 6,922. While these results may not seem to make much difference, they do indicate that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 packs a more powerful punch. 7]

Moving on to 3DMark's Wild Life Original Unlimited test, which benchmarks a phone's GPU, we again see that the Snapdragon delivers a smoother frame rate in graphics processing. 91.19 on the Exynos 2400 fps frame rate is reasonably good, but the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 trounces it with a frame rate as high as 120.44 fps.

If your game depends on latency and the speed at which graphically intensive frames are generated, this difference is significant enough that it could be the difference between hitting or missing the target in your favorite first-person shooter.

For ray tracing performance, we ran 3DMark's Solar Bay Unlimited; the Exynos 2400 recorded an average frame rate of 31.33 fps, while the Snapdragon-powered S24 scored a slightly better 33.54 fps. These scores are well above average, and while the Exynos 2400 does not reach the same frame rate, it is unlikely to make much difference when playing games that support ray tracing, such as Diablo Immortal.

As for the phone's day-to-day processing, Crossmark tests overall system performance and system responsiveness. The overall score is 1,389, which puts the Snapdragon ahead, but the Exynos 2400 is not far behind at 1,239. We are not too concerned with this test, as it is rare for a flagship device to be slow to respond to basic operations such as navigating the interface or running apps.

And finally, there is WebXPRT 4. This runs various scripts in the browser and measures their performance. Here again, the S24 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored an excellent 194. The Exynos 2400, on the other hand, is not far behind at 183.

All these benchmark tests prove that there is no comparison here: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is simply better than the Exynos 2400. However, what fascinated us most after testing all three versions of the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S24 is the chip's superior power efficiency. In fact, the Galaxy S24 Plus and S24 Ultra each logged an impressive 16+ hours in our battery benchmark test, ranking them on our list of best phones for battery life.

These long-lasting results are not only good, but a huge leap forward compared to last year's phones. The Exynos 2400 was inferior in all CPU and GPU tests conducted on the S24, but if battery life improves, it may be able to redeem itself. If not, it would mean that Qualcomm has reached new ground without anything comparable.