Samsung allegedly boosting benchmark performance

Anandtech digs deep on a forum allegation and finds depressing results.

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[Tyler X. Durden]

dmsilev[/url]":1svkoork]

ShlomoAbraham[/url]":1svkoork]Any theories as to why? If the chip is there, why not let other apps use it? Save battery life?

That'd be my guess. Set up a profile that runs the thing flat-out when it's in "benchmark the processor" mode and then throttles back for everything else to improve the battery life.

Exactly, which means they know damn well that when push comes to shove the speed vs battery trade-off they are using for everything else is what the vast majority of users will enjoy but that for a non-zero number of [potential] customers the e-peen of benchmarks moves product.

I'm not sure which is sadder of the two, the e-peen attitude or blatant deception used to play to it.

 

[Tyler X. Durden]

F22Rapture[/url]":3dc2zwzb]

Firehawke[/url]":3dc2zwzb]ATi and nVidia were both caught in the past doing this with video card benchmarks, too. I particularly remember one incident involving Quake 3 benchmark optimizations about twelve years ago where ATi was doing some specific optimizations that would only trigger when it detected the calling application was "quake3.exe"

Made it really easy to prove, too. Just rename the EXE and you'd see performance drop considerably.

Was that specific to the benchmark itself though? Making game-specific optimizations isn't really cheating. Cheating would be putting in extra effort to make the benchmark run better than the game does (optimizing a JS engine for Sunspider), or unlocking extra hardware functions not available to anything else (as Samsung seems to have done), or some other hack which misleads the benchmark (such as ATi reducing default image quality and accuracy to get a higher FPS).

If it is the incident I'm think of it I'm pretty sure it involved pre-loading and maintaining in cache certain textures that showed up in a demo sequence in those games that was commonly used for benchmarking (because it was a consistent use and exercising of the game engine that could be duplicated over and over).

So the optimizations would really only work for that particular map and to a certain extent that path.