Samsung has been infamous for memory-hungry TouchWiz, and other proprietary software, much of which are classified as bloatware by Android users. But this year has seen some excellent changes, as Samsung continues to improve their home-grown software, with the latest offering being an official optimization app for the flagship Galaxy devices. This app going by the moniker Game Tuner was released in Google Play Store by the official Samsung app development team, and as of writing supports Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Samsung Galaxy Note 5. According to their Google Store app page, the app is in the works for another two favorite new devices by Samsung – Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.
This app lets the user scale a game’s native resolution to a choice of presets in the app, and also features the ability to set the frame-rate of the game. This is really useful for gamers who want to reduce the resolution of the game and limit the framerate to reduce some of the strain on battery life and also conserve battery life, thus resulting in an increase in game time. The app lists all the installed games on the device and settings for each game can be set individually. The options for graphics (which changes the resolution) are low, medium and high. The count of FPS can be manually set by the user, according to his needs, all the way down from 15 FPS to 60 FPS. This feature also helps avoid throttling issues for ultra-high end games with high demands.
As of now, it seems to be compatible only with the devices powered by their latest Exynos SoC. Android systems allow native scaling of resolution, but the feature works system wide and cannot be tied to a single app or game. The surprising feature of the app is limiting the frame rate, as this is the first app of its kind to be able to do so. As a test, Hearthstone for Android runs on 1080p on every device, irrespective of the native resolution of the device, thus looking a bit blurred on 2k screens. It can now be run at 1440p aka 2k resolution, or down to 480p thanks to the new app by Samsung. Hopefully, Samsung is working to support older devices as well, as this is an incredibly useful app to have on your device.
The app is available for supported devices on the Google Play Store and has also been uploaded on APKMirror, for those who want to sideload the app. Sideloading is not recommended as reports from various users suggest that the app is having compatibility issues with certain S6 and S6 Edge models, after being sideloaded. Some carrier-branded phones are also having trouble running the device as the reviews suggest. General rating of the app is at 4.0, which is a splendid score for a new app from Samsung.
