Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S22 series has been mired in controversy following reports that the phones throttle performance in thousands of apps and games. The company’s GOS (Game Optimization Service) measures things like battery and temperature level and adjusts system performance to find some balance. Following all the negative backlash, Samsung promised to release an update to give users more control over Game Optimization Service meddling. Now we are already starting to see it arrive.
The new firmware for the Samsung Galaxy S22 series is being rolled out in Samsung’s home market of South Korea and removes GPU and CPU performance limits while playing games. It also introduces a new Game Performance Management Mode in Game Booster, but it is not yet clear precisely what that’s there to offer. In addition to this throttle-fixing stuff, Samsung also tells us to look for the usual assortment of bug fixes and improvements.
In our testing with the Game Optimization Service-enabled firmware on the Galaxy S22 Plus using a modified version of Geekbench, we found a 45% reduction in single-core scores and a 28% decline in multi-core performance. It will be interesting to see what impact this throttle-free update has on the phone’s gaming performance and whether it leads to any overheating issues.