Samsung's Exynos 2600 chip is certainly shaping up to be one of the highest performing mobile-focused chips of 2026, especially in the graphics department, where its Xclipse 960 GPU is emerging as an absolute beast of a performer. 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 might not be aware, the Exynos 2600 is Samsung's first chip that leverages its 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process, which is a 3D transistor architecture where the Gate completely surrounds the channel, which consists of vertically stacked nanosheets - on all four sides, resulting in improved electrostatic control and a lower voltage threshold.
It also features the Fan-Out Wafer Level Packaging (FOWLP) - which results in a smaller package area, albeit with additional I/O connections - and an innovative Heat Path Block (HPB), a copper-based heat sink that is in direct contact with a part of the AP, enabling a thermal resistance improvement of 16 percent, and a chip that is cooler by an average of 30 percent relative to previous-gen Samsung chips.
As far as its architecture is concerned, the Exynos 2600 chip features:
- 1x C1-Ultra core running at 3.90GHz (some leaks suggest a clocked 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 speeds undisclosed) with ray-tracing support
- AI Engine with 32K Mac Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
- LPDDR5X RAM support
Do note that the Exynos 2600 chip is expected to officially debut with the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 series.
This brings us to the core of today's topic. Samsung's Exynos 2600 chip is now at the apex of the Basemark Ray Tracing leaderboard, comfortably edging past Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. This is largely a function of the chip's Xclipse 960 GPU, which is the first to leverage a customized version of AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture.
This comes as Samsung's Exynos 2600 chip (Galaxy S26) recently managed to snag a score of 27,478 on Vulkan, which was just a smidge shy of the score of 27,875 that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip (Redmagic 11 Pro) managed to secure, placing the two chips in performance-related parity on Vulkan.
Meanwhile, as per a recent aggregation of Geekbench 6 OpenCL scores, the Exynos 2600's Xclipse 960 GPU exhibited a variation of just 3.4 percent between its lowest and highest scores, showing an overall remarkable level of consistency that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has failed to match so far.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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