The controversy surrounding the discovery that Samsung gimps the performance of games on its smartphones seems to have been serious enough for the company to be taking quick action. Soon after releasing the update that would bring an end to the reduction in gaming performance on the Galaxy S22 series in Korea, Samsung has begun rolling it out in Europe.
For those unaware, Samsung's Game Booster app, or the Game Optimization Service (GOS) that it runs in the background while you game, keeps games from using the full might of the CPU and GPU to keep your phone's temperature and battery life in check. However, on the Galaxy S22 series, this was found to be slowing down games a lot more than it did on previous flagships, prompting Samsung to release an update to fix it.
Game performance will still be ‘optimized', but you can turn it off if you want
That update has now reached Europe, and according to the changelog, GOS won't cap game performance as much as it did before, though it will still ‘optimize' performance if your device starts heating up. That's a good thing in our books, but if you don't like it, Samsung is providing an alternate performance management setting in the Labs section of Game Booster for those who want the fastest gaming experience and don't care for the heat it may generate.
If you're new to this, Game Booster can be accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen while a game is running and hitting the Game Booster icon on the bottom left hand side of the screen. There, you can find many options to improve your gaming experience, like turning off notifications when a game is running or disabling touch input if you leave a game running on the device too long without touching the screen. More details here, if you're interested.
In addition to all the game optimization stuff, the update will allow third-party apps to bypass GOS optimization. The new update also optimizes camera performance. We can vouch for that – the update makes the camera app as fast as it was out of the box, something that was affected by the previous update that was released for both the Snapdragon and Exynos variants of the Galaxy S22 phones.
You can check if the latest update — firmware version S90xxXXu1AVC6 — is available for your Galaxy S22, S22+, or S22 Ultra by opening its Settings app, navigating to Software update, and selecting Download and install. Our firmware archive will also have the firmware available for download in the near future so you can manually upgrade your phone using a Windows PC.
As for when this particular update will reach other parts of the world, we can assume it will be quite soon, and you can rest assured we'll let you know about it.
Thanks for the tip, Marcel!
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