Samsung allegedly boosting benchmark performance

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

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[F22Rapture]

Firehawke[/url]":3m1o2p0w]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).