Yesterday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Samsung held their Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event where they showed off their new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge smartphones. This devices have many great new features, among them include advanced gaming a graphics performance. These features will give you a “PC-Like Gaming Experience” according to Samsung.
With the new Galaxy devices one of the main goals was to make the gaming experience feel as good as a PC gaming experience. They aim to do this by offering a better gaming environment for mobile gamers as well as robust hardware and software tools that give more freedom to both gamers as well as developers.
Water Cooling?
Apparently it has been reported that the Galaxy S7 will have some type of water cooled processor. On Samsung’s own release they state that there is a “very thin thermal spreader”, although CNET reports there is “water cooling like you’d find in a serious desktop gaming system. Obviously the scale is miniature compared to desktop water cooling, but the sealed copper cooling system will still do its best to shift excess heat away from the S7’s processor when games push things to the phone’s thermal limits.” I think we are looking are more of a vapor chamber here, not traditional water cooling.
First To Use Vulkan API
Smasung’s Galaxy S7 phones are the first to use the Vulkan API, which is an open source low-overhead, cross platform 3D graphics and compute application programming interface that is actually built upon the components of AMD’s Mantle API. The API allows developers to access and task all of the individual cores of modern multi-core processors. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeny showed off ProtoStar, which is a a real-time 3D experience powered by both Vulkan API and Unreal Engine 4 that is designed to push mobile gaming to the next level.
Game Launcher and Software Features
Samsung is also rolling out a new Game Launcher. This is where you will find all of your games. Here you can launch games with a “No Alerts” mode that will stop all notifications from popping up so your game is not interrupted. You also have the ability to lock Recent and Back keys so you don’t accidentally kick yourself out of the game when playing.
Sharing your gaming moments is very popular now and Samsung knows this. You now have the ability to easily take screenshots and record your gameplay. There is even a picture-in-picture mode that will use the front facing camera and microphone to record you playing. This will enable gamers to create awesome walk-through videos!
You will be able to change graphics settings while you are in-game as well. Games will run at a maximum of 60 frames per second. You can switch to “low power” mode which reduces the frame rate to 30 FPS and will dial the resolution down a bit. There is even an “extreme low power” mode which will dial the resolution down even more, but keep the frame rate at 30 FPS.
All of these features will be able to be accessed from the “Game Tools” icon that will rest at the edge of your smartphone’s screen.
When talking about gaming these days you have to include VR. If you happen to pre-order one of the new phones it will come with a free Samsung Gear VR and a bundle of six games. Samsung will also be providing a Games Pack that offers $200 worth of free in-game currency.
Both the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are set to hit shelves on March 11th. Will you be getting one?
