Samsung has once again proven that their corporate ethics stretch about as far as a $5 shopping spree at Best Buy. Following a report from Beyond3D claiming that Samsung was artificially manipulating benchmark results with their Samsung Galaxy S4, the folks at AnandTech have confirmed that this is indeed the case – the device’s processor runs at a faster clock speed for many benchmarks than it does performing any end-user task.
From AnandTech (via The Loop):
…a post over at Beyond3D from @AndreiF gave us reason to dust off our international SGS4s. Through some good old fashioned benchmarking, the poster alleged that Samsung was only exposing its 533MHz GPU clock to certain benchmarks – all other apps/games were limited to 480MHz. For the past few weeks we’ve been asked by many to look into this, what follows are our findings.
And what exactly were the findings, you might ask? Here’s AnandTech’s consensus, in their own words:
Running any games, even the most demanding titles, returned a GPU frequency of 480MHz – just like@AndreiF alleged.[…] Firing up GLBenchmark 2.5.1 however triggers a GPU clock not available elsewhere: 532MHz. The same is true for AnTuTu and Quadrant.
Interestingly enough, the same behavior (on the CPU side) can be found on Qualcomm versions of the Galaxy S 4 as well. In these select benchmarks, the CPU is set to the maximum CPU frequency available at app launch and stays there for the duration, all cores are plugged in as well, regardless of load, as soon as the application starts.
[…]…you should be careful about comparing Exynos 5 Octa based Galaxy S 4s using any of the affected benchmarks to other devices and drawing conclusions based on that. This seems to be purely an optimization to produce repeatable (and high) results in CPU tests, and deliver the highest possible GPU performance benchmarks.
The translation? Samsung has (seemingly intentionally) rigged the Galaxy S4 to perform better in benchmarks than it is capable of performing in actual use – even in demanding applications like graphically intense 3D games. A truly pathetic and shameful way to make yourself look superior to the competition.
Then again…is anyone really that surprised?
