Recent reports suggest that the Galaxy S26 and S26+ are tipped to feature the Exynos 2600 in most global markets, while the Ultra variant is expected to retain the exclusive high-end Snapdragon silicon. Notably, early tests indicate the Exynos 2600 might actually have the upper hand over its Snapdragon counterpart in ray tracing performance.

A Galaxy S26 variant powered by the Exynos 2600 recently surfaced on the Basemark In Vitro ray tracing charts, claiming the top spot with an impressive score of 8,262. This result has caught the tech community's attention, hinting that Samsung’s new GPU could be a game-changer for next-gen mobile gaming.

For comparison, the Honor Magic 8 Pro—running the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5—scored 7,527, while the Vivo X300 Pro equipped with the Dimensity 9500 managed 7,057. By these metrics, the Exynos 2600 holds a roughly 9-10% lead over the Snapdragon and sits about 16% ahead of the MediaTek chip.

Samsung officially took the wraps off the Exynos 2600 last month. It marks a milestone as the world’s first mobile chip built on a 2nm process using Samsung Foundry’s GAA SF2 technology. Under the hood, it packs a 10-core CPU featuring next-gen Arm cores, with the prime core clocked at a blistering 3.8GHz.

The real star here is the Xclipse 960 GPU. Based on AMD’s RDNA architecture but custom-tailored by Samsung for mobile, the company claims it delivers a 50% boost in ray tracing performance compared to the Xclipse 950 found in the Exynos 2500.

While Exynos chips have historically performed well in ray tracing benchmarks against Snapdragon, synthetic tests only tell part of the story. We’ll need to wait for the official release of the Galaxy S26 series to see how it handles real-world gaming, power efficiency, and sustained performance.