Samsung Caught Boosting Galaxy S4 Benchmarks 234
A recent forum post at Beyond3D made an interesting claim: that the Samsung Galaxy S4's GPU ran at 532 MHz for certain whitelisted benchmark applications, and at 480 MHz for everything else. The folks at AnandTech decided to investigate and found out that the phone does indeed let its GPU run at a higher frequency when particular benchmark software is running. They found a similar oddity with the CPU — it wasn't restricted for other apps, but it was forced to run at max speed during benchmarks. Then they decided to look for direct evidence that this was intentional.
"Poking around I came across the application changing the DVFS behavior to allow these frequency changes – TwDVFSApp.apk. Opening the file in a hex editor and looking at strings inside (or just running strings on the .odex file) pointed at what appeared to be hard coded profiles/exceptions for certain applications. The string 'BenchmarkBooster' is a particularly telling one. ... Quadrant standard, advanced, and professional, linpack (free, not paid), Benchmark Pi, and AnTuTu are all called out specifically. Nothing for GLBenchmark 2.5.1 though, despite its similar behavior."
Re:And you think they're the only one why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except they're not overclocking anything because the GPU is rated for 533mhz.
They're just making sure that even if the benchmark apps don't tell it to work in it's most high performance profile that it does, because the whole point in benchmarks is to give a benchmark of the optimal performance of a device.
The danger is that if they don't do this then the benchmark programs will give a misleading view of the performance capabilities of the device because they'll only be running it in the more power saving oriented default mode.
What's the alternative, they don't do this and shitty benchmark apps that take no advantage of the optimisation options for the device suggest it's not as powerful as it really is and so they get slated for it being underpowered even if that's not true?
Re:And you think they're the only one why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which ones?
Re:Government Regulation (Score:2, Interesting)
Say what you have to say and let it stand instead of meta commenting.