Samsung Dex: A Viable Option for Gaming and Productivity

As I've been playing around with my new Galaxy S23 Ultra, I wanted to show off one of its most impressive features - Samsung Dex. Dex is a mode that allows you to use your phone as a PC-like device on a larger screen. We can kind of scale this on the window if we want to or we could go full screen it also has full support for like an Xbox controller and I've got one connected over Bluetooth right now.

With the S23 Ultra, you can Max this game out even in Samsung Dex mode actually one question I usually get here is you know the performance degradation from the regular Android mode to skim song decks and in the past I've actually done a video running benchmarks on both there was no noticeable difference in fact in one Benchmark we actually got a little bit of higher CPU score using Samsung Dex now if I were to run that same Benchmark a couple times in both we could have beat it out you know in Android mode versus Dex but it was still pretty impressive to see so there's really no performance degradation going over to a big screen like this.

Minecraft has always given me issues trying to scale it up in decks so we don't have that top bar with this one and no matter what I do I just can't go full screen with it but we can kind of scale the window itself to go as large as we want on the main screen here which does give us plenty of play room but it would be nice to kind of go total full screen I'm not sure if this is ever going to be resolved and it's actually been like this for a few years so I think this is how it's going to be another type of gaming that works out really well with Dex is cloud gaming be it GeForce now or one of my favorites Xbox cloud gaming or Game Pass right now I'm using the built-in Wi-Fi the Galaxy s23 Ultra but this Monitor and a lot of adapters out there that you're going to pick up to use decks with will have ethernet and when you're cloud gaming being wired it's just gonna make it a much better experience.

But even with Wi-Fi 6 and a decent connection you can play your favorite games here next up I wanted to show off a little bit of emulation here so we've got some PSPs and PPSSPP with Tekken 6 we're at 5x resolution using the Vulcan back in so we're scaled up close to that 1440p resolution and it really does look great on these larger displays another one that functions really well is es2 so we've got ether sx2 Gran Turismo 4 we're at 2x resolution and it really does make a difference going from the built-in screen here to a larger one I could probably upscale this a bit more I think we could handle 3x here with Gran Turismo 4 but I'm just sitting at two using the opengl back in and PS2 emulation on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is absolutely amazing.

So yeah I really do think that Samsung Dex is a very viable option for people who just already use their phone as their main PC this is going to work out in the Galaxy s23 the s23 Plus or the ultra you don't need to go super expensive with the ultra to get Samsung Dax the less expensive s23s are going to handle it just as well as the ultra does but keep in mind if you've already got like a Galaxy S9 sitting in a drawer somewhere you might have upgraded that also supports Samsung Dex and you can actually get a lot done even though it's working with an older CPU one of my favorite devices to use that I usually just have set up with Samsung Dex is the Galaxy s10e it was a cheaper one that I picked up on eBay it was a used device so I've actually had a blast using Samsung Dex on that for gaming emulation and even work but if you're not into decks remember this will support mirror mode I'm not a huge fan of it because we got those black bars on the top and bottom it just doesn't scale up correctly given the aspect ratio of the built-in phone screen.

But that's all for today's video really appreciate watching ever since this device released I've had a lot of people asking about Samsung decks so I figured I'd go ahead and show it off and yeah I mean given it's the newest Samsung Galaxy device on the market this is the best experience that I've had with Samsung Dex so far and it's kind of a given with the CPU we have here that Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is no joke it's a great arm SOC but you can always go with the lower end device and use this same setup it's got to be an S-Series Galaxy device from the S9 on up if you're interested in picking up anything that you saw in this video I'll leave some links in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on the s23 ultra just let me know down below but that's it for this one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso yeah no matter what galaxy s23 variant you're using you're going to have an absolutely amazing time with Samsung Dex especially when it comes to gaming and emulation hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime pack here again today we're going to be checking out Samsung Dex on the brand new s23 Ultra now I do want to mention that this will also work on the s23 and the s23 plus but this is the one I have in my possession right now and I'm going to tell you with this new Snapdragon CPU this is the best experience that I've ever had with Samsung Dex if you're not familiar with Samsung Dex basically on these higher end Galaxy S devices we also have something like a desktop mode and when connecting your Galaxy device to a larger display you can basically turn it into a work machine a console an emulation machine or a media playback device good for 4K 60 output it's still Android but it's kind of Samsung's desktop operating system that runs right beside you know regular Android that's on your built-in screen this will actually work wirelessly with your Windows PC or even a screen with Miracast or Chromecast built in but personally I like using a wired connection that way I don't have any kind of latency and there's several ways to go about this you can go with a cheaper USB type-c to HDMI adapter I'll leave some links in the description one of my go-to's is usually an adapter like this you can pick them up for around 18 to 25 on Amazon it has two USB 3.0 ports ethernet and power and plus HDMI out really awesome option but uh something that's been popping up quite a bit on eBay and Amazon recently are the steam deck docks for a pretty decent deal this will work with an Android device USB type-c in it's got HDMI out 4K 60 output couple USBS and ethernet you can set a larger Android device right in here horizontally and plug that USB type-c in right to your port on the phone and these do work but if you've already got a display be to monitor or TV with USB type-c video in you don't need an adapter like this another thing I would highly recommend is kind of a keyboard and mouse combo you can go wired with it or you can go USB with an adapter and if you want a game definitely pick up a nice Bluetooth controller the Xbox One controllers work great with Android but with all that of the way let's go ahead and get into it and see how the new Galaxy s23 performs with Samsung Dax okay so like we saw there are several ways we can connect this device to a larger display you can go Wireless with it but you're only going to get 30 FPS personally I like going wire you can use a dock or an adapter like I showed or if you've got a monitor that supports USB type-c video in that's probably going to be your best bet this is the way I like it set up that way when I'm playing games on a bigger screen I have no input latency going Wireless will work for like watching videos and maybe doing a little bit of photo editing here and there but if you're going to do anything intensive I would definitely go wired with it now from the phone itself we've got a built-in trackpad you can actually set this right down in front of the Monitor and use it it's got multi-gester support built in and this will get you by but uh you know this does support a keyboard and mouse you could go with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo or if you've got a dock or an adapter or a monitor like this that also has USB in you can use a wireless setup with a USB dongle and that's exactly what I have here just a cheaper Logitech mouse and keyboard and as you can see I mean we've got basically a full-blown desktop operating system here we also have dedicated Samsung deck settings so from here we can actually change the resolution but this monitor only goes up to 1440p over USBC but as you can see we're at 1440p it'll also support 1440pm on Ultra wide monitor we've also got our sound settings so we can actually have sound come through the phone or the connected display we've got Mouse settings so we can change the cursor speed and things like that we can also kind of scale up the whole operating system because at 1440p it might be a bit hard to see at least on camera so we can actually take this up a bit and just makes everything a bit bigger but we're still running at 1440p 60 hertz it does have multi-windows support and I've actually had up to five apps running at the same time we can kind of scale these up scale them down it's even got a snap feature and most of the apps that I've tested from Google Play do scale up properly go in total full screen but there are a few exceptions like Minecraft it's just a little odd we can't go total full screen in Dex mode but uh we can scale it by dragging the window out and we can get really close to full screen but for some reason that one just is always giving me issues I'm looking for another app here to kind of have three apps up and running so we'll go with PPSSPP we can scale each one of these windows to our liking so we can make it fit our screen if you're using you know a smaller monitor you might want to scale these down or scale them up but uh like I mentioned a lot of these will go total full screen we'll check out uh PPSSPP got this little bar here full screen without a you know our action bar up top but we can always kind of hover over it and it'll pop up for us we're definitely going to be testing out a few things but uh the first thing I wanted to show off was a little bit of 4K video playback with the Galaxy s20 3 Ultra we've got more than enough power I mean heck even from the S9 with decks installed we could do 4K 60 pretty well and over USB type c it supports HDR so right now I'm going to have this running at 4K 60 with hdr on I've got stats for nerds up in the top left hand corner and just by the end of this video we had three drop frames remember we've got Wi-Fi 6 built in here but you could always connect an ethernet adapter if you wanted to three frames something you'd never notice and this usually happens even on high-end systems on the initial load-in thank you main things a lot of people use Samsung Dex for is work and you know we'll just check out some spreadsheets here using Google Sheets doing it on the built-in screen on the phone you know it can definitely be done but having this bigger screen here and multi-app support or multi-window support does work wonders you could also use Microsoft Excel if you want to but in my experience Google Sheets does work out much better with this multi-window support in Android right now photo editing on a big screen is really the way to go and you could always use your favorite app but these Adobe apps like Lightroom actually support Dex mode quite well we've got full Mouse functionality so we've got the multi-gester support and things like that double tap we've got right click left click makes it really easy to edit these images on a bigger screen using Dax and I'll tell you what one of my favorite apps to use with Samsung Dex is actually Adobe rush for video editing it's a lightweight video editor but it's pretty powerful if you know what you're doing and uh just like Lightroom we've got full mouse support here so it makes it really easy to kind of navigate these windows and get some video editing on the go out of the way but really when it comes down to it might go to use case scenario for Samsung Dex is actually gaming be it native Android gaming cloud gaming and especially emulation we're going to go with some Call of Duty mobile and we can kind of scale this on the window if we want to or we could go full screen it also has full support for like an Xbox controller and I've got one connected over Bluetooth right now and with the s23 ultra you can Max this game out even in Samsung Dex mode actually one question I usually get here is you know the performance degradation from the regular Android mode to skim song decks and in the past I've actually done a video running benchmarks on both there was no noticeable difference in fact in one Benchmark we actually got a little bit of higher CPU score using Samsung Dex now if I were to run that same Benchmark a couple times in both we could have beat it out you know in Android mode versus Dex but it was still pretty impressive to see so there's really no performance degradation going over to a big screen like this and like I mentioned Minecraft has always given me issues trying to scale it up in decks so we don't have that top bar with this one and no matter what I do I just can't go full screen with it but we can kind of scale the window itself to go as large as we want on the main screen here which does give us plenty of play room but it would be nice to kind of go total full screen I'm not sure if this is ever going to be resolved and it's actually been like this for a few years so I think this is how it's going to be another type of gaming that works out really well with Dex is cloud gaming be it GeForce now or one of my favorites Xbox cloud gaming or Game Pass right now I'm using the built-in Wi-Fi the Galaxy s23 Ultra but this Monitor and a lot of adapters out there that you're going to pick up to use decks with will have ethernet and when you're cloud gaming being wired it's just gonna make it a much better experience but even with Wi-Fi 6 and a decent connection you can play your favorite games here next up I wanted to show off a little bit of emulation here so we've got some PSPs and PPSSPP with Tekken 6 we're at 5x resolution using the Vulcan back in so we're scaled up close to that 1440p resolution and it really does look great on these larger displays another one that functions really well is es2 so we've got ether sx2 Gran Turismo 4 we're at 2x resolution and it really does make a difference going from the built-in screen here to a larger one I could probably upscale this a bit more I think we could handle 3x here with Gran Turismo 4 but I'm just sitting at two using the opengl back in and PS2 emulation on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is absolutely amazing so yeah I really do think that Samsung Dex is a very viable option for people who just already use their phone as their main PC this is going to work out in the Galaxy s23 the s23 Plus or the ultra you don't need to go super expensive with the ultra to get Samsung Dax the less expensive s23s are going to handle it just as well as the ultra does but keep in mind if you've already got like a Galaxy S9 sitting in a drawer somewhere you might have upgraded that also supports Samsung Dex and you can actually get a lot done even though it's working with an older CPU one of my favorite devices to use that I usually just have set up with Samsung Dex is the Galaxy s10e it was a cheaper one that I picked up on eBay it was a used device so I've actually had a blast using Samsung Dex on that for gaming emulation and even work but if you're not into decks remember this will support mirror mode I'm not a huge fan of it because we got those black bars on the top and bottom it just doesn't scale up correctly given the aspect ratio of the built-in phone screen but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate watching ever since this device released I've had a lot of people asking about Samsung decks so I figured I'd go ahead and show it off and yeah I mean given it's the newest Samsung Galaxy device on the market this is the best experience that I've had with Samsung decks so far and it's kind of a given with the CPU we have here that Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is no joke it's a great arm SOC but you can always go with the lower end device and use this same setup it's got to be an S-Series Galaxy device from the S9 on up if you're interested in picking up anything that you saw in this video I'll leave some links in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on the s23 ultra just let me know down below but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watchingso yeah no matter what galaxy s23 variant you're using you're going to have an absolutely amazing time with Samsung Dex especially when it comes to gaming and emulation hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime pack here again today we're going to be checking out Samsung Dex on the brand new s23 Ultra now I do want to mention that this will also work on the s23 and the s23 plus but this is the one I have in my possession right now and I'm going to tell you with this new Snapdragon CPU this is the best experience that I've ever had with Samsung Dex if you're not familiar with Samsung Dex basically on these higher end Galaxy S devices we also have something like a desktop mode and when connecting your Galaxy device to a larger display you can basically turn it into a work machine a console an emulation machine or a media playback device good for 4K 60 output it's still Android but it's kind of Samsung's desktop operating system that runs right beside you know regular Android that's on your built-in screen this will actually work wirelessly with your Windows PC or even a screen with Miracast or Chromecast built in but personally I like using a wired connection that way I don't have any kind of latency and there's several ways to go about this you can go with a cheaper USB type-c to HDMI adapter I'll leave some links in the description one of my go-to's is usually an adapter like this you can pick them up for around 18 to 25 on Amazon it has two USB 3.0 ports ethernet and power and plus HDMI out really awesome option but uh something that's been popping up quite a bit on eBay and Amazon recently are the steam deck docks for a pretty decent deal this will work with an Android device USB type-c in it's got HDMI out 4K 60 output couple USBS and ethernet you can set a larger Android device right in here horizontally and plug that USB type-c in right to your port on the phone and these do work but if you've already got a display be to monitor or TV with USB type-c video in you don't need an adapter like this another thing I would highly recommend is kind of a keyboard and mouse combo you can go wired with it or you can go USB with an adapter and if you want a game definitely pick up a nice Bluetooth controller the Xbox One controllers work great with Android but with all that of the way let's go ahead and get into it and see how the new Galaxy s23 performs with Samsung Dax okay so like we saw there are several ways we can connect this device to a larger display you can go Wireless with it but you're only going to get 30 FPS personally I like going wire you can use a dock or an adapter like I showed or if you've got a monitor that supports USB type-c video in that's probably going to be your best bet this is the way I like it set up that way when I'm playing games on a bigger screen I have no input latency going Wireless will work for like watching videos and maybe doing a little bit of photo editing here and there but if you're going to do anything intensive I would definitely go wired with it now from the phone itself we've got a built-in trackpad you can actually set this right down in front of the Monitor and use it it's got multi-gester support built in and this will get you by but uh you know this does support a keyboard and mouse you could go with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo or if you've got a dock or an adapter or a monitor like this that also has USB in you can use a wireless setup with a USB dongle and that's exactly what I have here just a cheaper Logitech mouse and keyboard and as you can see I mean we've got basically a full-blown desktop operating system here we also have dedicated Samsung deck settings so from here we can actually change the resolution but this monitor only goes up to 1440p over USBC but as you can see we're at 1440p it'll also support 1440pm on Ultra wide monitor we've also got our sound settings so we can actually have sound come through the phone or the connected display we've got Mouse settings so we can change the cursor speed and things like that we can also kind of scale up the whole operating system because at 1440p it might be a bit hard to see at least on camera so we can actually take this up a bit and just makes everything a bit bigger but we're still running at 1440p 60 hertz it does have multi-windows support and I've actually had up to five apps running at the same time we can kind of scale these up scale them down it's even got a snap feature and most of the apps that I've tested from Google Play do scale up properly go in total full screen but there are a few exceptions like Minecraft it's just a little odd we can't go total full screen in Dex mode but uh we can scale it by dragging the window out and we can get really close to full screen but for some reason that one just is always giving me issues I'm looking for another app here to kind of have three apps up and running so we'll go with PPSSPP we can scale each one of these windows to our liking so we can make it fit our screen if you're using you know a smaller monitor you might want to scale these down or scale them up but uh like I mentioned a lot of these will go total full screen we'll check out uh PPSSPP got this little bar here full screen without a you know our action bar up top but we can always kind of hover over it and it'll pop up for us we're definitely going to be testing out a few things but uh the first thing I wanted to show off was a little bit of 4K video playback with the Galaxy s20 3 Ultra we've got more than enough power I mean heck even from the S9 with decks installed we could do 4K 60 pretty well and over USB type c it supports HDR so right now I'm going to have this running at 4K 60 with hdr on I've got stats for nerds up in the top left hand corner and just by the end of this video we had three drop frames remember we've got Wi-Fi 6 built in here but you could always connect an ethernet adapter if you wanted to three frames something you'd never notice and this usually happens even on high-end systems on the initial load-in thank you main things a lot of people use Samsung Dex for is work and you know we'll just check out some spreadsheets here using Google Sheets doing it on the built-in screen on the phone you know it can definitely be done but having this bigger screen here and multi-app support or multi-window support does work wonders you could also use Microsoft Excel if you want to but in my experience Google Sheets does work out much better with this multi-window support in Android right now photo editing on a big screen is really the way to go and you could always use your favorite app but these Adobe apps like Lightroom actually support Dex mode quite well we've got full Mouse functionality so we've got the multi-gester support and things like that double tap we've got right click left click makes it really easy to edit these images on a bigger screen using Dax and I'll tell you what one of my favorite apps to use with Samsung Dex is actually Adobe rush for video editing it's a lightweight video editor but it's pretty powerful if you know what you're doing and uh just like Lightroom we've got full mouse support here so it makes it really easy to kind of navigate these windows and get some video editing on the go out of the way but really when it comes down to it might go to use case scenario for Samsung Dex is actually gaming be it native Android gaming cloud gaming and especially emulation we're going to go with some Call of Duty mobile and we can kind of scale this on the window if we want to or we could go full screen it also has full support for like an Xbox controller and I've got one connected over Bluetooth right now and with the s23 ultra you can Max this game out even in Samsung Dex mode actually one question I usually get here is you know the performance degradation from the regular Android mode to skim song decks and in the past I've actually done a video running benchmarks on both there was no noticeable difference in fact in one Benchmark we actually got a little bit of higher CPU score using Samsung Dex now if I were to run that same Benchmark a couple times in both we could have beat it out you know in Android mode versus Dex but it was still pretty impressive to see so there's really no performance degradation going over to a big screen like this and like I mentioned Minecraft has always given me issues trying to scale it up in decks so we don't have that top bar with this one and no matter what I do I just can't go full screen with it but we can kind of scale the window itself to go as large as we want on the main screen here which does give us plenty of play room but it would be nice to kind of go total full screen I'm not sure if this is ever going to be resolved and it's actually been like this for a few years so I think this is how it's going to be another type of gaming that works out really well with Dex is cloud gaming be it GeForce now or one of my favorites Xbox cloud gaming or Game Pass right now I'm using the built-in Wi-Fi the Galaxy s23 Ultra but this Monitor and a lot of adapters out there that you're going to pick up to use decks with will have ethernet and when you're cloud gaming being wired it's just gonna make it a much better experience but even with Wi-Fi 6 and a decent connection you can play your favorite games here next up I wanted to show off a little bit of emulation here so we've got some PSPs and PPSSPP with Tekken 6 we're at 5x resolution using the Vulcan back in so we're scaled up close to that 1440p resolution and it really does look great on these larger displays another one that functions really well is es2 so we've got ether sx2 Gran Turismo 4 we're at 2x resolution and it really does make a difference going from the built-in screen here to a larger one I could probably upscale this a bit more I think we could handle 3x here with Gran Turismo 4 but I'm just sitting at two using the opengl back in and PS2 emulation on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is absolutely amazing so yeah I really do think that Samsung Dex is a very viable option for people who just already use their phone as their main PC this is going to work out in the Galaxy s23 the s23 Plus or the ultra you don't need to go super expensive with the ultra to get Samsung Dax the less expensive s23s are going to handle it just as well as the ultra does but keep in mind if you've already got like a Galaxy S9 sitting in a drawer somewhere you might have upgraded that also supports Samsung Dex and you can actually get a lot done even though it's working with an older CPU one of my favorite devices to use that I usually just have set up with Samsung Dex is the Galaxy s10e it was a cheaper one that I picked up on eBay it was a used device so I've actually had a blast using Samsung Dex on that for gaming emulation and even work but if you're not into decks remember this will support mirror mode I'm not a huge fan of it because we got those black bars on the top and bottom it just doesn't scale up correctly given the aspect ratio of the built-in phone screen but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate watching ever since this device released I've had a lot of people asking about Samsung decks so I figured I'd go ahead and show it off and yeah I mean given it's the newest Samsung Galaxy device on the market this is the best experience that I've had with Samsung decks so far and it's kind of a given with the CPU we have here that Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is no joke it's a great arm SOC but you can always go with the lower end device and use this same setup it's got to be an S-Series Galaxy device from the S9 on up if you're interested in picking up anything that you saw in this video I'll leave some links in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on the s23 ultra just let me know down below but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching\n"