How to Make Your Galaxy S8 Faster
As the first devices packing Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 835 system on a chip, Samsung's Galaxy S8 is one of the fastest phones you can buy right now. That means everything from gaming to multitasking to productivity always feels snappy, but that doesn't mean you can't tweak a few settings to get even better performance. So here are a few tips and tricks to wring every last bit of speed out of your Galaxy S8.—Sam Rutherford
Change your performance mode
For the Galaxy S8, Samsung has thoughtfully implemented a device maintenance section that lets you choose from a number of performance modes — Optimized, Game, Entertainment and High Performance. However, despite the seemingly straightforward labels, the option called High Performance won't actually increase your processing power at all.
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That's because high performance mode is meant to increase your screen brightness and set the display to its full 2960 x 1440 resolution. For increasing performance, the setting you really want is Game Mode, which should give you smoother graphics while gaming and a little extra oomph while doing everything else. Just be aware that any performance gain comes at the cost of decreased battery life.
Go to the Device Maintenance section in Settings, tap the button for Performance Mode, and select Game Mode from the available options.
Clean up your phone
Another handy setting in the S8's Device Maintenance menu is its optimization setting. That setting gives you a quick look at how bogged down your phone currently is; you can press a button to clean out your cache and unnecessary background apps to bring your phone back up to full speed. For people who go days without turning off their phone, the optimization button is a super simple way to make sure your phone is running fast all the time.
Go to the Device Maintenance section in Settings, and hit the big blue button to optimize your phone.
Decrease your resolution
The more pixels your phone has to render, the more taxing it will be on your CPU and GPU, especially when it comes to gaming. But it you adjust the resolution down, you should be able to get slightly smoother and less stuttery gameplay.
Search for Display in Settings, select the option for Screen Resolution, and move the slider to the left to decrease your resolution.
Turn on download booster
Performance isn't always about crunching numbers or pumping out high FPS. So if you want to download things faster instead, you can turn on the S8's Download Booster setting. This allows your phone to use both Wi-Fi and LTE connections at the same time to download files even faster than normal. Since Download Booster is using your cellular connection, though, enabling this feature will have an impact on your overall data usage; it could push you up against and possibly over your data cap.
Search for Download Booster in Settings, and just tap the toggle to turn it on.
Turn on Game Launcher
If you are a really serious mobile gamer, enabling the S8's Game Launcher is a must. Not only does it provide a nice folder for storing all your games, inside the folder, there are dedicated options for disabling notifications during games, muting the sound when games are launched and turning on a various performance modes for either extra horsepower or increased battery saving.
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Search for Game Launcher in Settings, and just tap the toggle to turn it on. Note: If you have already installed games, the S8 will automatically place the app icons for each game inside a newly created Game Launcher folder.
Turn on Developer Mode
Not every setting on the phone is immediately available for you to adjust. If you turn on Developer Mode by tapping 7 times on the S8's build number in the About Phone section of Settings, you can unlock a whole new menu of settings to play around with.
In the developer options you can improve performance by adjusting things like how aggressive your phone is when switching between cell and Wi-Fi connections, speeding up animations when opening apps or navigating the home screen, and even changing hardware acceleration settings. Just know that changing some of these settings could potentially harm your phone — after all, these aren't things Samsung wanted everyone to play with.
