Samsung’s Exynos 2600 Chip Takes First Place on Ray Tracking Leaderboard After Beating Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Samsung’s Exynos 2600 chip is certainly shaping up to be one of the most focused mobile chips of 2026, especially in the graphics department, where its Xclipse 960 GPU emerges as an absolute beast for the gamer. Now, that same GPU has pushed the Exynos 2600 to the top of the Basemark Ray Tracing leaderboard.
The Exynos 2600 SoC’s Xclipse 960 GPU propels it to the top of the Basemark Ray Tracing leaderboard
For the benefit of those who may not know, the Exynos 2600 is Samsung’s first chip that uses its 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process, which is the construction of a 3D transistor where the Gate completely surrounds the channel, which contains vertical nanosheets – on all four static sides, which leads to low electrolyte retention.
It also has Fan-Out Wafer Level Packaging (FOWLP) – which leads to a smaller package area, although with more I/O connections – and a Heat Path Block (HPB), a heat sink made of copper that is in direct contact with the AP component, which allows a 16 percent improvement in heating, and Samsung’s cooler chip which is the previous ratio relative to the 0 chip.
In terms of its construction, the Exynos 2600 chip features:
- 1x C1-Ultra core running at 3.90GHz (some leaks suggest a clock frequency of 3.80GHz)
- 3x C1-Pro cores running at 3.25GHz
- 6x C1-Pro cores running at 2.75GHz
- Samsung Xclipse 960 GPU (clock speed not disclosed) with ray tracing support
- AI engine with 32K Mac Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
- LPDDR5X RAM support
Note that the Exynos 2600 chip is expected to officially debut with the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 series.
This brings us to the heart of today’s topic. Samsung’s Exynos 2600 chip is now at the top of the Basemark Ray Tracing leaderboard, well ahead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. This is mainly the work of the chip’s Xclipse 960 GPU, which is the first to use a customized version of AMD’s RDNA 4 Architecture.
This comes as Samsung’s Exynos 2600 chip (Galaxy S26) recently managed to get 27,478 points in Vulkan, which was just shy of the 27,875 Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip (Redmagic 11 chip) managed to secure two chips in the Pro. Vulkan.
Meanwhile, as per the latest compilation of Geekbench 6 OpenCL scores, the Exynos 2600’s Xclipse 960 GPU showed a 3.4 percent difference between its lowest and highest scores, showing an impressive level of consistency that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has failed to match so far.
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