Samsung Accused Of Cheating, Designing Galaxy S4 To Beat Benchmarks

Experts suggest that Samsung had modified some versions of its best-selling Galaxy S4 smartphone to display levels of performance in benchmarks that are unattainable in real life.

The inconsistency, discovered by the users of beyond3D forum and backed up by AnandTech, is connected to the GPU clock speed increases in certain popular tests.

Samsung has denied it has tampered with software to make the S4 look more powerful than the competition.

The mystery of “BenchmarkBooster”

The Galaxy S4 sold 10 million units in less than a month, making it the most successful smartphone ever released by the Korean company. It is thinner than its predecessor and actually smaller in size, despite the bigger 5-inch display.

The version sold in the UK runs Android 4.2.2 on a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor, with an Adreno 320 GPU. However, some international models of the handset ship with Exynos 5 Octa – two quad-core processors clocked at 1.6GHz and 1.2GHz in a Big.little configuration, along with a PowerVR SGX 544 GPU.

According to a member of beyond3D under the nickname Nebuchadnezzar, the PowerVR GPU clock speed is generally limited to 480MHz, except when the phone is running popular benchmarks such as AnTuTu and GLBenchmark. When the smartphone is being tested, the frequency is boosted by another 52MHz.

AnandTech also reports of the CPU clock speed being automatically set to its highest limit in certain benchmarks, regardless of the load. This is true for both quad and octa-core versions of Galaxy S4.

The testers found a string of code named “BenchmarkBooster” in S4 software which seemingly proves the smartphone was designed to perform better in particular applications. The string explicitly mentions popular testing suites such as AnTuTu, Quadrant and Linpack.

It is important to note that Samsung never officially published the clock speeds for its GPUs, so the only way to measure their performance is through benchmarks.

The higher GPU frequency offers about 11 percent gain in visual performance, and allows Galaxy S4 to come ahead of competitors such as the iPhone 5 and HTC One.

Samsung has responded to the allegations, saying that it “did not use a specific tool on purpose to achieve higher benchmark scores.” According to the company, any full screen app will trigger a boost in GPU clock speed, up to 533MHz limit.

Samsung didn’t comment on the fact that benchmarks not mentioned in the S4 software code would still hit the GPU clock limit of 480MHz.

How much do you know about Samsung? Take our quiz!