Exynos 2600 scores matches Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in Vulkan GPU benchmark
Samsung’s next flagship chip is starting to show up more often in benchmarks, with numbers that are hard to ignore. The Exynos 2600 has now posted a strong result in Geekbench’s Vulkan GPU test, putting it right next to Qualcomm’s best.
According to the latest Geekbench 6 Vulkan benchmark, the Exynos 2600 scored 27,478 points. That’s surprisingly close to Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which scores 27,875 points in the same test. The gap is small enough that, on paper at least, most users wouldn’t notice a difference.

This isn’t the first time the Exynos 2600 came closer to its Snapdragon counterpart. Back in January, the chip scored 25,460 points in Geekbench’s OpenCL test. Again, it had a marginal difference from Qualcomm’s 25,971 points on the same benchmark.
Exynos 2600 matches Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 performance on OpenCL and Vulkan
Both OpenCL and Vulkan benchmarks are designed to measure GPU compute performance, but they focus on slightly different things. OpenCL is more about traditional general-purpose parallel computing, which is relevant to tasks like image processing and some AI workloads.
Vulkan, on the other hand, is a modern, low-overhead API built for high-efficiency graphics and compute tasks. It’s especially relevant for gaming, advanced visuals, and machine learning on mobile devices. Strong Vulkan scores usually hint at better performance in modern games and graphics-heavy apps.
Woah, Exynos 2600 GPU just hit Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 scores in OpenCL on Geekbench! pic.twitter.com/DBVhXwTGUI
— Kaulenda (@BairroGrande) January 22, 2026
Part of this improvement likely comes down to how the Exynos 2600 is built. It’s Samsung’s first mobile chip made using a 2nm gate-all-around (GAA) process. This approach wraps the transistor gate around the channel on all four sides using vertically stacked nanosheets, which helps improve efficiency and performance while reducing power leakage.
On the graphics side, the chip features the Xclipse 960 GPU based on a custom version of AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture. It’s designed specifically for high-performance gaming.
Samsung is also trying to tackle heat with Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) along with a Thermal Block (HPB) design. By placing a copper heatsink directly in contact with the chip die, Samsung says it has reduced thermal resistance by 16 percent, which should help maintain performance under sustained loads.
Of course, benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. Real-world performance, battery life, and thermals in actual Galaxy S26 phones will matter far more. But these numbers suggest the Exynos 2600 could finally be competitive in a space Qualcomm has dominated for years.
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