Samsung, once already caught for rigging Galaxy S4 to perform well in benchmark tests, is at it again and this time it has done so with its recently released Galaxy Note 3.
According to investigation by Ars Technica, Galaxy Note 3 is capable of inflating the benchmarks scores by as much as 20 percent giving a false picture of its performance levels. The discrepancy was noted first when the Note 3 benchmarks were way too better than those of LG G2, which actually packs the same kind of hardware as Note 3 albeit a Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.3GHZ. If two devices have the same processor benchmarking results should more or less be identical.
The report on Ars indicates that certain benchmarks tests would actually lock out all four cores of the processor to trigger maximum 2.3GHz performance CPU, while some benchmarks don’t trigger such a behavior. This means that Samsung somehow rigged its Note 3 to push the CPU to perform with added juice rather than acting normal.
Results of a benchmark of the rigged Note 3 are way off the charts as compared to LG G2. A Note 3, when not rigged, gives more or less the same results as the G2. The Note 3 hasn’t been particularly fast or a whole lot impressive if compared to G2 in regular usage and that’s what the benchmarks should actually consider and not juiced up four core performance.
Ars went ahead extracting, disassembly and file conversion to retrieve a human readable java code from a file that supposedly contains the rigged code. “The file we ended up with is called “DVFSHelper.java,” and it contains a hard-coded list of every package that is affected by the special CPU boosting mode. According to this file, the function is used exclusively for benchmarks, and it seems to cover all the popular ones”, notes Ars.
“There’s Geekbench, Quadrant, Antutu, Linpack, GFXBench, and even some of Samsung’s own benchmarks”, the site adds further.
Samsung needs to stop publishing fake benchmarking results and actually own up to this cheating.
