Why the Galaxy S9 could be a better gaming phone than the iPhone X

Samsung announced its latest flagship phone this week, and the Samsung Galaxy S9 looks... a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S8.

But wait! There's more! While the S9 might not be setting too many pulses racing, there's plenty to be excited about from a gamer's perspective.

Indeed, the Samsung Galaxy S9 arguably has a leg up over Apple's current flagship, the iPhone X, when it comes to gaming. Allow us to explain.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 has a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED display. The iPhone X also has a 5.8-inch AMOLED display. So what gives?

Well, while the actual quality of the iPhone X screen is pretty much unrivalled, the Galaxy S9's screen (and the S8's before it, to be fair) is a more regular shape. There's no notchy nonsense providing a lopsided view of landscape-oriented games, and no exaggeratedly curved corners to cut off UI elements.

Take it from a current iPhone X owner who has grown to love his phone - this is really quite annoying.

Okay, so the sides of the Galaxy S9 do curve away in their own weird way, but the image the S9 presents is still more uniform - and thus more game-friendly - than the iPhone X.

Oh, and the S9's screen is also much more pixel-packed (570ppi vs 458ppi), which means that games have the potential to look sharper on the S9.

The iPhone X runs on a beast of a processor in the A11 Bionic, and early benchmarks suggest that it outperforms this year's main Android phone processor, the Snapdragon 845.

But the thing is, most Galaxy S9 owners won't be getting the Snapdragon 845. Only US users will, with the rest of the world getting Samsung's own custom Exynos 9810 chip.

We'll need to wait for final hardware to judge the difference, but last year's model (the S8) showed a clear GPU advantage for the custom Exynos model over its Snapdragon-equipped counterpart.

It's quite possible, then, that the Samsung Galaxy S9 will be a bit of a polygon-pushing beast, and will give the iPhone X a run for its money on the gaming performance front.

We should also point out that the Galaxy S9 will have 1GB of extra RAM at its disposal, while the larger Galaxy S9+ will have double the RAM of the iPhone X at 6GB.

One of our key bugbears with the Galaxy S range has been their lack of stereo speakers. Even the ever-tardy Apple corrected its own similar sound omission with last year's iPhone 7, and the iPhone X follows suit.

With the Samsung Galaxy S9, Samsung has given its champ a proper audio overhaul.

You get left and right speakers for landscape gaming, and they combine to crank out sound 1.4 times louder than the Galaxy S8 before it too.

Okay, so this is a feature that appears to match rather than trump the iPhone X - but it's another important gaming feature that Samsung's top phone no longer lacks.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 will be able to stand up to the iPhone X in many ways, but crucially it will do so for a much lower price.

Admittedly, £739 is hardly cheap. In fact, it's £50 more than the Galaxy S8 was at launch last year. But it's still £160 less than the price of a new iPhone X.

Think what an avid pocket gamer could do with £160. That's four boxed Nintendo Switch games, a New Nintendo 2DS XL with Pokemon Ultra Sun, or a whole bunch of Google Play Store credit.

We're confident that the Samsung Galaxy S9 will at least be able to match the iPhone X on power and sound output, and that its more uniform and pixel-dense display might actually top Apple's phone in gaming terms.

There's one outstanding trump card the iPhone X holds over the Galaxy S9 though, and it's a familiar one. It has the games.

Developers still tend to bring the best games to iOS first. The Google Play Store gets a lot of simultaneous releases, but quite a few still follow on later or not at all.

For die-hard Android gamers, though, we could have ourselves a new champion headset in the Samsung Galaxy S9 - and it's one that could very well give the iPhone X a bloody nose.