What you need to know
- Samsung this week launched a new app aimed at improving gaming performance on its phones.
- The GameDriver app allows the company to update GPU drivers for games separately from larger system updates.
- Currently, only a handful of games are supported, though the company is promising to expand that number soon.
Mobile gaming has become an incredibly lucrative market over the last decade and has, in recent years, taken center stage in the smartphone world, with every new flagship offering at least some gaming-oriented features — not to mention the gaming smartphones with desktop-inspired liquid-cooling heatsinks and more.
In yet another sign of mobile gaming picking up some of the best parts of desktop gaming, Samsung this week announced the launch of a new GameDriver app. While Samsung's phones are already among the best Android phones out there, this change will make them even better gaming machines!
The app's description simply calls it a collection of "Game drivers to enable best gaming experience with improved graphics performance on Galaxy devices," but it represents a far more significant change for mobile gaming.
It essentially allows Samsung to decouple GPU driver updates from larger system updates. This not only allows for a much faster cadence of releases, as the company no longer has to wait for carrier approval, but also enables games to be significantly more optimized, much like Nvidia's monthly GeForce releases are tied to optimizing the gaming experience for the latest titles.
The list of games currently supported includes only Call of Duty: Mobile, Black Desert, and Fortnite, though Samsung is set to expand that list soon enough, with several game developers already on board.
GameDriver is only supported on the Galaxy S20 and Note 20 series at the moment, though Samsung is promising to expand availability to other devices in the future. If you do own either handset, though, you can go ahead and download the app here.
