Galaxy S7 Series : Samsung’s Step Towards the Future of Mobile Gaming
Samsung on the first day of the Mobile World Congress 2016 announced its new flagship, the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 edge phones to the world. While on the outside the phones might look very similar to their predecessors, but from the inside, the S7 series may well just be a much-awaited leap towards the future of mobile gaming.
With the Galaxy S7 phones, the company wants users to “rethink what a phone can do”. It has a vision of making mobile games look and feel as much like desktop games as possible on the Samsung Galaxy S7 mobile platform. This is an ambitious project, to say the least, and quite frankly there’s a huge difference between saying “we take games seriously” and delivering on such tall promises, but a quick look at the fancy tech that the Galaxy S7 series comes packing on both the hardware and software front sheds more light at what really Samsung has in store for mobile gamers across the globe.
Optimized for Performance
The core requirement for any graphics intensive game is raw processing power at the CPU and GPU’s end. The Samsung Galaxy S7 series phones depending on the variant availability come with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC or the Exynos 8890.
These brand new SoCs will provide more than 30 percent faster CPU processing and more than 60 percent faster GPU processing capabilities when compared to the last generation of chipsets on the Samsung phones. The SoCs on the Samsung S7 series phones are paired with 4GB of RAM for seamless performance, and the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge as a result, have decent firepower to run games available on the Play Store.
These SoCs as the company claims are going to be great at power efficiency and that working in tandem with the 3000mAh and 3600mAh battery packs on the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge will mean longer gaming sessions.
Water Cooled Systems to Rival Desktop Machines
Phones running high-end multi-core CPUs are notorious for running a bit too hot under stress, and as we know, heat is the ultimate enemy of any gaming machine. No matter the exalted processing capabilities of a phone, or beefy battery packs that they come with, if it runs hot, you game not.
Samsung in its bid to fight this menace has come up with a system that’s not new to bigger desktop machines but is groundbreaking for mobile devices. The Galaxy S7 and S7 edge are equipped with a very thin sealed copper liquid based cooling system, enabling these phones to run cool and fast without facing any CPU or GPU throttling. The system keeping the internals of the phone cool will also result in better battery life.
Vulkan API
Mobile phones benefiting from the great advancements in silicon technology over the years have become smaller, thinner and at the same time grown more powerful. The latest generation of mobile phones bring with them specs which boast of computing power at times even surpassing that of the last generation consoles such as the Xbox 360, and PS3.
Though at the hardware end the industry has been able to cram in such advanced hardware inside the miniature chassis of these phones, but on the software end, owing to many bottlenecks the industry has not been able to put the hardware at hand to optimum use and recreate the truly immersive gaming experience that is often seen on desktop systems and consoles. With the Galaxy S7 Samsung is taking the first step at changing just that.
Galaxy S7 and S7 edge are the first smartphones to utilize Vulkan: the next generation graphics API. The Vulkan API was developed by the Khronos Group using the AMD’s Mantle API as a base.The switch to Vulkan API in the future with supported games will offer users significantly better performance and lesser CPU usage in the form of increased distribution of workload on the multiple cores of the chipset. Multi-Core processing will also see the phone being far more energy efficient at the same time.
This switch to Vulkan API will further allow processing of games utilising the full power of the Octa-Deca core CPUs, in comparison to the current generation OpenGL ES API which only allowed processing of games using a single core. This will result in more graphic intensive games making its way to the mobile platform, and in real life situations unlock the true potential that mobile devices in our hand hold inside them.
Game Launcher
Just to show Samsung really cares about gaming and gamers on the Galaxy S7 platform, the South Korean tech giant has brought with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge an all new app which it fondly calls the “Game Launcher.”
It is essentially an evolution of the ” Game Tuner” already available on the last generation S6 devices, and comes with a suite of utilities and nifty tricks for improving user experience while gaming on the Galaxy S7 devices.
All games on your Galaxy S7 device will automatically be added to the Game Launcher folder and will be accessed from there for what Samsung claims will be a “better experience”, and that’s indeed what the Game Launcher really does.
A new “No Alerts” mode is added which tells the S7 to suppress all notification pop-ups so you can play uninterrupted without the fear of a notification of a SPAM mail ruining your immersive gaming experience. The Game Launcher also allows the user to lock the Recent and Back keys so that accidentally kicking yourself out of a game can be avoided.
The Game Launcher feature further allows the user to maximize game-playing time through instant downloads, shortcuts and power-saving options. In addition, it also helps you to take screenshots, record your game, scores and rankings, and share them with friends.
