There are many users who have a Samsung Galaxy in their hands who enjoy hours and hours of fun playing all kinds of video games from their smartphones from the South Korean firm. Therefore, it is always good to pay close attention to the performance of the terminal, especially in those titles in which the power of the mobile device will be key for us to win the game.
Not all terminals have an option to check how powerful the smartphone is in a specific video game, but, luckily for you, Samsung mobiles hide an extra setting between their One UI customization layer that will help us know at all times what is the performance of the mobile device . But what specifically does this tool for the South Korean brand’s mobile phones do?
What is it for
GPUWatch is a tool to observe the activity of the GPU, that is, of the graphic unit of mobile devices. This is the one that accompanies the processor, also known as the CPU. This is software that is designed primarily for developers who use Samsung devices in order to obtain information related to the work that the GPU does.
Therefore, once we enable this setting on our mobile devices, we will see detailed information that is superimposed on the phone’s own screen in real time. Besides that it is very simple to enable, and no PC is required.
It is a hidden function that is not easily found, so we are going to show you where it is, how it is activated and what it is for. Although, depending on the version of the operating system that you have installed on your smartphone, as well as the age of your smartphone, you will have a newer or older version of Samsung’s GPUWatch .
And although it can be used in different ways according to our needs, the truth is that it will be the ideal setting for those users who spend hours and hours playing with a Samsung phone . And, if we know the data and the power with which the terminal works, we can act in case the phone becomes too slow in a specific game. However, it will also help you understand the performance of your applications.
How to activate it
As we have been warning you, we will not need the help of any other device, but we will find this setting on Samsung’s own mobile, although it is somewhat hidden. And, we must first go to enable the developer options of our phone with One U I. To do this, follow these steps:
- Enter your mobile settings.
- Go to the About phone section.
- Enter Software Information.
- Find the section called Build number and click repeatedly on it until a warning appears on the screen that will tell you that the developer options have been activated.
- Go back to the Settings menu and go all the way down until you find the Developer Options .
When entering these options, we will finally find the GPUWatch tool among all the functionalities that the developer options offer us. Therefore, you just have to enable the switch that appears next to its name.
At that very moment, we will start to have a widget that is superimposed on the screen, so we can see different graphs with the FPS (frames per second) of a game, as well as the current GPU and CPU load. That is why we told you that it would be a great option for the most ‘gamers’ users, since we can know if the mobile is performing as well as it should.
Your configuration
Depending on the age of our mobile device, or the version of Android that we have installed on the smartphone, we will have one or the other of the three different versions of GPUWatch in Samsung terminals :
- v1.0
- v1.5
- v2.0
We will explain the latest version of this Korean brand mobile software. Although, the truth is that it has only changed where the menus are, since the available settings are the same in the three available versions. To begin with, once we have this tool enabled, by clicking on it we will find its own menu in which we will have the following settings:
- General settings .
- Widgets : FPS, load and context information.
If we go into the general configuration of the GPUWatch , we will see the following details:
Update interval: Each metric is calculated from values measured over a period of time that are set in the update interval settings. That is, we will set the milliseconds (ms) that are used to measure the ping, with which we will be able to know if the latency is good or not.
- Background color: will be the background color of the widgets.
- Background transparency: we can configure the transparency of the widgets.
- Graph grid: the grid will or will not be shown in widgets with graphs.
- Margins: we can activate or deactivate the margins between widgets.
Also, so that we can more quickly configure this tool. Once we enable it, it will begin to show in the phone’s notification panel . In it, we will see different buttons that will give us the following advantages:
- Off: we will disable GPUWatch. This is equivalent to disabling this tool from Developer Options.
- Hide / show widgets.
- Lock / unlock widgets: we can unlock them so that we can freely move the widgets around the screen by dragging.
Lock the position of the widgets. - Select context: we can select EGL_CONTEXT or vkDevice to create profiles if the application has several.
- Settings: open the general settings of the GPUWatch tool.
Compatible mobiles
The truth is that not all mobile devices from the Korean manufacturer are not compatible with this tool that allows us to know the power of the smartphone at any time when using an application or while we are playing with the phone. To begin with, and how we have warned you previously, depending on the model of the smartphone or the Android update that we have in the terminal, we will have one or another version of GPUWatch.
For example, the oldest Samsung phones to have this tool are the Galaxy S9, so the previous models will not have exactly this software among the options for developers offered by the Korean company.
However, all phones that have been updated to Android 11 will have GPUWatch v2.0 . On the other hand, if they have Android 10 it will be v1.5, while those models from the Galaxy S9 that remain on Android 9, could only have a version 1.0 of this software.
