Samsung Galaxy S25 Series Review: Great Cameras And Pervasive AI

We tested the S25 Ultra and S25 Plus under various cellular conditions. These phones do an admirable job of holding onto a call and reproducing audio, in both strong and poor service areas. Samsung's excellent speakers also make the speakerphone a joy to use. These phones support voice over 5G and Wi-Fi calling on virtually every carrier network, too. A few years ago, Samsung's Qualcomm Snapdragon modems were head and shoulders ahead of Google's Tensor, which ironically, uses Samsung modems. With the Tensor G4, Google's performance is much better. It's a closer contest today, but Samsung's phones are still slightly better than Pixels for cellular calls in our testing, and are among the best on the market.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Voice And Data

S25U 5G

Unlike many 5G phones, Samsung goes to the added effort of supporting both sub-6GHz and millimeter wave networks. The latter are faster, but have shorter range and are only found in dense urban areas. We've been testing the phones on T-Mobile's 5G network, mostly on the "ultra capacity" bands it acquired in the Sprint merger. Speeds are very much in line with other phones, with several hundred megabits down even in areas with poor reception. Upload speeds vary dramatically on T-Mobile's network in our experience. However, the S25 phones do about as well as any other device we've tested.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Performance

All three Galaxy S25 models have a variant of Qualcomm's flagship processor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The version used in Samsung's phones have slightly higher clocks compared to the chip in other phones, which will result in increased performance. It's technically faster in some tests, but actual performance varies based on numerous factors, over and above CPU frequencies.

Galaxy S25 Series 6
Galaxy S25+

We'll get to the benchmarks soon, but the numbers don't tell the whole story. The Galaxy S25 phones feel similar in daily use than a Pixel or OnePlus phone—apps open quickly, animations are smooth, and even very demanding games run well. We've never felt like we were waiting on the phone to catch up. However, it is strange Samsung only offers 12GB of RAM in the lineup for the US market. The Ultra should at least offer 16GB. 

With especially demanding games, the S25s do keep things running more smoothly than, for example, a Pixel phone. However, Samsung's phones do get toasty. Samsung says it redesigned the thermal system in the S25 family to maintain better sustained performance, but the hot-clocked Snapdragon 8 Elite in these devices seems to pump out a fair amount of heat.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Series Geekbench Results

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world workloads in image processing and particle physics calculation scenarios. We tested all of the smartphones featured here with Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads.

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The S25 series put up some of the highest scores in our database. They run neck-and-neck with the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro in high-performance mode. In any objective measurement, the latest Snapdragon is blazing fast.

Geekbench also offers an AI benchmark, which is important in this age when every new mobile chip makes grander promises of AI integration.

GBAI

Despite having the same architecture as the SD8 Elite in the OnePlus 13, Samsung's phones are well out in the lead here. Using the Qualcomm API to access the NPU, these phones have set a new high watermark for AI throughput on phones.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Series PCMark For Android Benchmarks

Futuremark's PCMark for Android is an excellent suite of tests if you want to benchmark a wide range of tasks on any handset -- things like image and video editing, as well as lighter-duty, everyday workloads such as email and web browsing. When you see the test running live, it's clear the scripted application tests are carefully selected and tuned to make use of the each mobile platform in a very controlled way.

PCMark

The varied nature of the PCMark test can cause some devices to stumble—a low score in one sub-test can drop the overall score dramatically. The S25 series doesn't stumble, though. They manage among the best scores we've seen, coming in just below Asus' overclocked phones and the Snapdragon 8 Elite reference phone we tested several months ago.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Graphics And Gaming Benchmarks Results

Next, let's take a look at the S25 Ultra in GFXBench, which has been one of the standard mobile graphics/gaming performance benchmarks for years. To ensure that display refresh (v-sync) and resolution aren't limiting factors, we're comparing off-screen test results here. GFXBench tests OpenGL ES graphics workloads and we're specifically testing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, as well as Vulkan in the latest iterations.

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Aztec

The S25 phones are in good company at the top of these benchmarks with the OnePlus 13 and Asus ROG phones. The S25 Ultra and Plus trade victories here, suggesting the performance of the less expensive Plus model is right in-line with the top-end Ultra.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Series 3DMark Sling Shot Benchmark

UL's 3DMark Sling Shot is one of several current tests in the 3DMark mobile suite. Unlike previous-gen 3DMark mobile tests, Sling Shot is a much more advanced OpenGL ES 3.1 and Metal API-based benchmark that employs more advanced rendering techniques, like volumetric lighting, particle illumination, multiple render targets, instanced rendering, uniform buffers and transform feedback.

Slingshot

In addition to the GPU-based graphical test, Slingshot has a CPU physics component. This trips up some phones, which drags the score down. The Galaxy S25 Ultra ends up a bit higher than the S25+, but both are running behind the OnePlus 13. Regardless, the S25s perform very well in this test.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Series 3DMark Wild Life Benchmark Tests

3DMark Wild Life is the latest cross-platform test from UL. Its primary purpose is to measure GPU performance across platforms, and two distinct tests are available. The standard Wild Life test is designed to give feedback on how a game performs over a short period of time. With mobile games, people typically play in brief spurts when they find some free time; be it on the bus, on the subway, or a quick battle royale session over lunch break.

Wild%20Life

The S25 family does well in the purely graphical Wild Life test. The Ultra attains the highest score we've seen, reaching the same overall score as the Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device. The S25+ is technically behind, but the gap is small. All the SD8 Elite phones are out in front of older models.

The 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test runs this same benchmark 20 times consecutively, to show how a device performs over the long haul and quantify any degredation due to thermal throttling.

S25 stress
Galaxy S25


S25p stress
Galaxy S25+


S25U stress
Galaxy S25 Ultra

The Galaxy S25 series all throttle significantly in the Wild Life stress test. The S25 Ultra has a more capable cooling solution than last year's phone, but the speedy Snapdragon chip in these devices still overwhelms it. This phone loses almost half of its speed over the duration of the test. This result is slightly worse than last year's S24 Ultra. The S25+ and S25 are not immune either. In fact, the they both lose slightly more than half of their performance in the Wild Life stress test.

As mentioned above, these phones get very warm during extended gaming. You shouldn't have trouble with most titles, but if you play something like Genshin Impact on high settings, you may notice the phone getting warm and slowing down after a few minutes. The good news is the Snapdragon 8 Elite starts so much faster than everything else that it's still relatively speedy when throttled, but performance at the beginning of the session won't be the same after a few minutes of high-paced action.

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