Despite power upgrade, the Galaxy S23 series still has a GOS toggle

In 2022, Samsung faced a lot of flak when it came to light that it was throttling games on the Galaxy S22 series via its Game Optimizing Service (GOS) but not throttling benchmarking apps. In essence, this allowed for artificial scores on benchmarks that users could sustain in the real world. In response to this, Samsung pushed an update within One UI that allowed users to turn off GOS manually. This allowed access to the full power of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor (as well as the Exynos 2200 model) in games.

Today, Samsung took the wraps off the 2023 Galaxy S phones. Now, Android Authority has learned that the Samsung Galaxy S23 has a GOS performance toggle as well, which appears to be exactly the same as what we saw on the Galaxy S22. Check out a screenshot below.

It is unclear what the existence of this toggle means. One of the main reasons Samsung introduced this option on the Galaxy S22 was because the phone’s processor overheated and was a battery hog in some scenarios (e.g. gaming). Ostensibly, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside the Galaxy S23 series should solve this problem, based on what we’ve seen from other 8 Gen 2 and 8 Plus Gen 1 handsets. Not to mention that Samsung worked with Qualcomm to fine-tune the chip for these phones. Samsung shouldn’t need a GOS toggle at all.

That said, this could just be a carry-over from the Galaxy S22, giving users the option to toggle gaming battery/performance optimizations on and off. Some users may still find this useful for protracted gaming sessions, where heat will inevitably become an issue. However, if the 8 Gen 2 is as efficient as claimed, the toggle may not do much of anything regarding the Samsung Galaxy S23 performance outside of more extreme use cases.

There is a chance, though, that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy doesn’t completely solve its predecessor’s overheating/battery drain problems. If that’s the case, the GOS switch might be there because Samsung thinks users might want to turn its optimizations off. In this way, it could be preemptively trying to avoid the heavy controversy from last year.

We’ll need to do our full round of testing with the Samsung Galaxy S23 performance before we can come to any conclusions here. However, if you were wondering what was going on with GOS on the Galaxy S23, that’s what we know so far.