Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Benchmarks (vs Galaxy S23 Ultra)

The release of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra means a group of current owners of the legendary Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra might be contemplating if it is worth upgrading. While the biggest reason to get the S24 series is the Galaxy AI features at the moment, I believe a large portion of the users might be looking at the other things such as the camera or the performance upgrade.

I initially planned to wait for the latest firmware to drop before conducting a complete benchmark test. Still, it turned out that repeatedly refreshing the update page wouldn’t do anything if Samsung never actually released the update. Since I was running out of time to conduct the test, I went and proceeded with all the benchmarks with the current firmware:

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra:

• SM-S928B/DS
• One UI 6.1
• Android 14
• Build Number – UP1A.231005.007.S928BXXU1AWM9
• Android security patch level – 1 January 2024

Geekbench 6

Geekbench 6 shows a significant multi-core performance upgrade on the S24 Ultra. The reason is largely due to the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with updated ARMv9.2A architecture:

• 1x 3.3 GHz ARM Cortex-X4 (Prime)
• 3x 3.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A720 (Performance)
• 2x 3.0 GHz ARM Cortex-A720 (Performance)
• 2x 2.3 GHz ARM Cortex-A520 (Efficient)

Meanwhile, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with ARMv9.0A architecture:

• 1 x 3.2 GHz ARM Cortex-X3 (Prime)
• 2 x 2.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A715 (Performance)
• 2 x 2.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A710 (Performance)
• 3 x 2.0 GHz ARM Cortex-A510 (Efficient)

Besides, Qualcomm also relocates one of the efficiency cores in favour of a 3.2 GHz performance core. That probably helps with the peak multi-core performance by sacrificing the efficiency cluster.

Geekbench ML

CPU

GPU

NNAPI

Geekbench ML is a cross-platform AI benchmark that evaluates AI workload performance. This tool measures the CPU, GPU, and NPU to determine the device’s readiness for machine-learning applications.

While we did witness how the Galaxy AI can harness the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s processing power through offline interpretation, unfortunately, the feature is still exclusive to the S24 series which we are unable to compare with the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Besides, we are unsure how Qualcomm allegedly claimed the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s NPU is 98% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but we shall leave this for future evaluation.

3DMark Solar Bay

The GPU has been upgraded from Adreno 740 to Adreno 750 with a major boost in GPU frequency – 680MHz to 900MHz. The result is a significant improvement when it comes to graphics performance. It is very obvious from the 3DMark Solar Bay benchmark test that shows an almost 50% score increment.

As seen on our sister site’s gaming test video, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is capable of handling Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings while keeping the frame rates consistently above 50fps. The community is generally impressed with the gaming capabilities of the device given that some games allow up to 120fps.

CPDT

Last but not least, the storage performance. Even though on paper both S24 Ultra and S23 Ultra are having UFS 4.0 storage, upon testing we realized the S24 Ultra is generally faster on all aspects. Notably the sequential read speed is almost doubled from its predecessor. Gamers and mobile content creators would definitely benefit from this.

Conclusion

To answer our initial question on whether the Galaxy S23 Ultra owners should upgrade, I would say it depends on what you do on your phone. Everyday users probably can’t tell the differences since the Galaxy S23 Ultra is an awesome device that still triumphs over many other options in the market. Plenty of current owners would vouch with the excellent camera module that takes wonderful images without any hesitation.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra would be more suitable for those demanding users, such as gamers and content creators. The added performance headroom over the Galaxy S23 Ultra would be beneficial to gamers that seeking for that extra fps while content creators would fully utilize it for faster multimedia exports. Apart from that, content creators would appreciate the Galaxy AI features such as AI photo/video editor and AI transcription.