Samsung Exynos 1280 – The Good and The Ugly – Performance Analysis

Psst – The Samsung Exynos 1280 is the new Replacement for the Exynos 9611, It looks good in Pen and Paper, But sucks in gaming.

Thanks to Digital India, all of my Indian Brothers and Sisters, fellow Youtubers who pinned down Samsung to such a level, that the company which used to offer (plaskit) and the spamming the redundant and Exynos 7580 every year, is now thinking to offer competition in the sub 20k bracket.

To be very honest, the less than 20k bracket is dominated by Realme, Mi, Technospark and other manufacturers, who provide outstanding specification’s and impressive build quality along with really compelling camera setups.

Their gaming performance is very much acceptable, with minor adjustment, one can easily stream games with those devices, they offer 5G too, regardless of chipset used, either Mediatek or Snapdragon, the developers make sure to optimize before the device hits the shelves.

Rambling About Samsung – Problems from the Past

Coming to Samsung, they have been making Exynos chipsets for more than a decade now, some of them were successful and well some of them became for the meme’s, Oh I forgot to mention that Exynos 9611 ascended the 7580, but the chip was quite strong, it supported all the bells and whistles since the GPU in it was a Mali G72, it supported the new Open GL ES extension, Vulkan and more. Though GPU driver update is a thing which every Android gamer dreams for, being a part of Android Project Treble, seamless GPU Driver updates.. eh? Nope..

Samsung on the other hand, makes sure that they use the earliest and shittiest batch of driver release out there at the time of making the kernel, despite the issues such as poor Open GL performance which ends up hampering that set of gamers looking to emulate ps2 / wii games in their mobile devices, added with horrible Vulkan API performance, and so many things such as poor ram / page swapping, abnormal UI freezing and what not!.

Take a note Snapdragon Version of the flagship’s by Samsung Has no such Issues, its not that they get GPU Drivers Daily. It’s just that Samsung never released an actual flagship with reasonable price tag and with a Snapdragon Variant. Why Us? and the people in the UK.. Why are we subject to beta testing, your worthless Exynos chip has no value against the hard earned money we end up paying . Adding the Import duties and Tax over it makes the matter even worse!. Arun from MR Whostheboss clearly made a video regarding this issue, which covers more than just gaming problems.

Despite the ARM Mali developers daily releasing fixes and patches which addresses all the problems in the Bitfrost architecture, nope Samsung wont do a damn thing, 2 years over no update – just buy a new one, mind you the Samsung store app will always offer you special discounts and exchange offers, anyway who cares eh?

its Samsung, a rich fat guy with a big belly will buy it anyway, so yeah.. or maybe now they need to compete because, things are changing, yes, they are, you reading this, you are the reason, plastic using crap company has been forced to change, congrats brother keep it up.

Another video explains how the Exynos 9810 found in the Galaxy S9 Plus acts weird, I personally have this device and no, It wasn’t weird from the very beginning, Samsung software updates hehe.. that’s another storm coming soon.

Samsung Exynos 1280 Brief Overview – The Good

The Exynos 1280 debuted in the Galaxy A33 5G and A53 5G. The 1280 moves to a 5nm process with two high-speed Cortex A78 CPUs and six efficient A55 cores. The latest update from Samsung’s semiconductor group focuses on the experiences you can enable with the new Exynos 1280, some of which were limited to its flagship chips before.

For example, the chip can do 120Hz at 1080p resolution, which is competitive with mid-range Qualcomm chips. And yes, it supports 5G as seen on the A53, and Samsung is really pleased about its “5G for all” angle. Although, 5G is not exactly a flagship-only feature anymore with options like the Dimensity 700. At least Exynos 1280 is catching up.

Samsung also promises smoother gaming performance with the chip’s Valhall-based ARM Mali-G68 GPU. Optimization for this architecture is still limited, but it should have better battery life than past designs thanks to a technology called Fused Multiply-Add (FMA), which can perform multiple floating-point operations in a single step.

Talking about Synthetic Benchmarks – Credits to Android Authority

The scores are impressive, Considering this device is said to cost less than 20K and Added There’s an AI accelerator on board for local ML processing. It manages up to 4.3 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is in the same neighborhood as the Hexagon DSP in Qualcomm’s 750G chipset

The A53 only has a 64MP primary camera, but the Exynos 1280 supports up to a 108MP sensor. That’s the kind of hardware we’re used to seeing on Samsung’s flagship phones, but such components are already coming down in price. It can also handle a quad-camera setup, which the A53 and A33 technically have, even though one of them is a near-useless depth sensor. The 1280 can also do 4K video recording at 30 fps, but that’s no surprise having seen the A53.

There have only been a few Exynos 1280 phones so far, but no doubt we’ll see Samsung use this hardware a lot as 2022 continues. See below for the (mostly) full specs as posted by Samsung.

Samsung Exynos 1280 – The Ugly and Terrible Gaming Performance in Genshin Impact

The problems In previous Samsung Exynos Iterations which I have written in the sub topic Rambling About Samsung, the way it suffers in Genshin Impact, a Vulkan based title, is almost similar, Samsung yet again happens to be using premature drivers resulting such worthless performance, the hardware is powerful but the drivers are just – let’s say a rickshaw puller driving a Mercedes? I don’t know, you be the judge.