Early Samsung Galaxy S10+ Benchmarks Show Snapdragon 855 Dominating

Without a doubt, Samsung's new Galaxy S10 family is impressive on many levels. While Samsung's top flagship smartphone is the Galaxy S10 5G, that device won't be shipping until later in the first half of 2019. Until then, the Galaxy S10+ will reign supreme as the top end device that Samsung has to offer; and from our early look at this device, it appears to be a pocket-sized supercomputer.

The top-end Galaxy S10+ comes packing a 6.4-inch Dynamic AMOLED display with a 19:9 aspect ratio and Quad HD+ resolution. It features a total of three rear cameras, two selfie cameras, a large 4100 mAh battery (which can be wirelessly charged, or in turn, it can wirelessly charge other devices with Wireless PowerShare), Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 6 and it runs the Android 9 Pie operating system with Samsung's One UI layered on top.

But what everyone wants to know of course is how does this bad mobile mother perform? Well, in the short amount of hands-on time with this device, let's just say that it smokes every Android device that came before it by a fair margin. You can chalk that up to the new 7-nanometer Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor that Samsung has employed onboard this mobile beast. It's paired with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM depending on the configuration and up to a bodacious 1TB of internal storage space, or 1.5TB with an external micro SD card plugged in.

While you'll have to wait until our full review to get the complete picture with respect to performance and battery life, you can marinate on these numbers for the time being in Geekbench, GFX Bench, and 3DMark Slingshot. 

Starting off with Geekbench, we see that the Galaxy S10+ is about 38 percent faster in single-core performance 20 percent faster in multi-core performance, versus our current Android champion: the ASUS ROG Phone operating in X Mode. Needless to say, we're going to be seeing some impressive numbers from the incoming class of Snapdragon 855 flagships that will be pouring in over the next few months from various manufacturers beyond Samsung's beasties.

Moving on to 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Unlimited, the performance differential between the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855 and the Adreno 630 onboard in the Snapdragon 845 is impressive. The Galaxy S10 is roughly 21 percent faster than the Google Pixel 3 XL and the Galaxy S9+ in this OpenGL 3.0 graphics and gaming benchmark.

The dominating performance of the Galaxy S10+ carries over to GFXBench, where we see a 10 percent advantage in T-Rex and a 17 percent differential in the more advanced Manhattan run, in favor of the Snapdragon 855, compared to its previous gen Snapdragon 845 rivals.

Granted, this is just a small taste of the potential of the Snapdragon 855 and the Galaxy S10+, but we like what we see so far. Stay tuned for our full review of the Galaxy S10+ and the rest of its siblings in the coming weeks.

Updated, 2/21/19 - 5:12PM - Our graphs have been updated here to include Huawei Mate 20 numbers, based on the company's Kirin 980 mobile processor.