Why the Samsung Galaxy S10 family will be great for gamers

Earlier this week, Samsung launched a staggering five new flagship phones. Four of those belong to the new Galaxy S10 family, and three of those will be available to purchase in early March.

It's those three imminent phones - the Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, and the Galaxy S10 Plus - that most people will be buying. The Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Galaxy Fold will arrive later, and are intended for niche audiences.

But while the S10 family might not have 5G connectivity or foldable displays, they are set to be great for gamers.

X-rated specs

The three mainline Galaxy S10 phones vary in a number of pretty obvious ways. They have different screen sizes, for one. The Galaxy S10e has a 5.8-inch screen, the S10 6.1-inch, and the S10 Plus 6.4-inch.

The latter two have triple-camera systems on the back, while the Galaxy S10e just has the two. The smallest (and cheapest) device also drops the curved-screed design of the other two.

But something all three phones have in common is power. They each use the same custom Exynos 9820 CPU, which is built to a compact 8nm process and tops out at 2.7GHz. It's backed by a Mali-G76 MP12 GPU.

All three phones have 8GB of RAM at least as an option, with the S10 Plus even containing a stonking 12GB option. Sure, the Galaxy S10e starts out with 'only' 6GB of RAM. But that's still plenty, and besides, its less pixel-dense display won't be so demanding.

Keeping things cool

Of course, it's all very well having such blazing-fast potential. That counts for diddly squat in a mobile device if it's running so hot that it can't work flat-out for longer than a minute or two.

Samsung has thought of this, and has fitted the S10e and the S10 with advanced heatpipe cooling systems. The Galaxy S10 Plus gets stepped up to a vapor-chamber cooling system, which sounds similar to the one used in the Xbox One X.

Enough with the techy waffle. All you really need to know is that these phones are going to be extremely fast. Indeed, early benchmarks suggest that the S10 family hops over all but the iPhone XS family in overall performance terms.

Revving the engine

So the entire Galaxy S10 family is very fast as standard. But that's not where the gaming advantages end.

In its Unpacked launch event, Samsung also revealed that it's been working with the makers of the Unity game engine to optimise the the S10 family specifically for games that run on it.

Unity is the engine that powers almost half of the 1000 most popular games in the world. In particular, these will be the first phones built to work seamlessly with Unity's new adaptive performance feature. It's all going to be silky smooth.

Through a combination of universally speedy hardware, ramped-up cooling, and game engine optimisation, the Galaxy S10 family is shaping up to be incredibly well-suited to mobile gaming.