[Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra] velqn:
Very well said! Honestly I am a bit puzzled and lightly frustrated as I have been doing this GOS on/off test since the Note 20 Ultra/S21 and now with the S22U all strictly Exynos units. Exynos 2100 at the end after many updates was more or less stabilized to a point where even in my 1 hour torture throttle test it behaved more steadily then the Exynos 2200 - but this is the typical Samsung story - they release the latest gen and it takes so much months and updates to make it OK to a point where they need to release the next SoC and series.

So that`s a bit frustrating - going with the latest phone & SoC will get you a minor increase if even no increase at all. But let`s say we are used on Sammy doing that. Now with the Exynos 2200 and the Xclipse 920 things were supposed to be different - or at least were market differently - remember the Exynos 2200 launch - gaming revolution, new era, the AMD GPU and the RDNA v2 with the huge potential of hardware RTX ray tracing and the VRS variable rate shading... and when it launched it was quickly discovered that the Adreno 730 was 30-40% faster than the Xclipse... but then drivers were blamed...

Now back on the question What is happening beside GPU / CPU clockspeed adjustment.

There were some posts back here pointing to a KR forum where a bit more insight has been provided on how the latest GOS works - what was covered in Max`s W. tweet in an android police article also touch based on the things discovered on this KR forum:

It's also not your usual throttling. So far as Android Police's Max Weinbach can tell digging into some of the code that appears to control it, it's incredibly sophisticated, balancing multiple parameters like temperature, expected battery level at different times, CPU speed, and predicted FPS benefits when determining what sorts of resources a given game gets. This tuning likely varies from app to app and game to game, so the benchmark numbers you see reported here and elsewhere may not be accurate to all circumstances.

Also when this issue unraveled Samsung said the following:

Our priority is to deliver the best mobile experience for consumers. We value the feedback we receive about our products and after careful consideration, we plan to roll out a software update soon so users can control the performance while running game apps,”

and

“The Game Optimizing Service (GOS) has been designed to help game apps achieve a great performance while managing device temperature effectively. GOS does not manage the performance of non-gaming apps,”

So I am now even more puzzled - it seems that when GOS is on some heavy acrobatics are performed in the background - and that actually might not be bad if it`s done in a controlled way and if the user has the option to opt -in/out.

Now the issue with that is the following - it`s just so scattered. What do I have in my mind:

1. First there is the GOS - it has a priority mode

2. Then there is the Game Plugins with Priority and Game Booster Plus mode

3. Then there is the Thermal Guardian part of Good Guardians where you can adjust temp setting with -/+ 2 degrees °C

4. Then we have the enhanced/balanced/maximum processing settings via Device Care / Battery

So what takes precedence? When you enable Game Booster Plus you get some messages that some of the other modes might not work as expected so it`s probably a good start - but it seems to me like many dev teams works in silo mode - working on the same components or part of them - not necessarily sharing knowledge.

So besides the GPU/CPU clockspeed does Samsung rely on changing CPU governors parameters, i.e. did they implement a smart overclock in real time based on some parameters readings? Is that effective at all?

Samsung are pushing more & more for that sustained performance and when I was testing the day 0 updated and the March AVBF update it seems that they sacrificed a bit of the peak performance to get more sustained performance over time.

If you want to jag up your phone and get the best of it probably that wont work. Samsung say they will issue a software update to allow us to control the performance while running game apps but all of this somehow happens even now.

What I think they can do be a bit more transparent and they tried to do so -but it all seems like gimmicks, e.g. the Game Booster Plus will give you options to go for MAX FPS or MAX quality or performance, and you can change/tweak this settings individually for all games. And then we come to the Geekbench controversy - them deciding to delist Samsung as ti seems that they do not affect benchmarks with their "clever" or "not so clever" overclocking capabilities.

The solution might be again something related with transparency - keep this clever algorithms to measure 1000 things and decide what`s best for you, so that you are not unhappy when playing but you still have some battery at the end and you phone doesnt burn your hands...

and give the user the option to switch all of that - but natively from the system. What`s the point of making GOS as a system apps and getting the users to find alternative ways to mess up with this - just make this as a standard option.

Combine all the power management + performance management settings in a single dashboard so that they are not scattered all over the places... that would be a good start.