The battle for the best and most powerful Android smartphone in the world is sometimes heavily fought in benchmark scores. This is how the Galaxy S3 was known to be the better Android phone. Same is true with the Galaxy S4.
However, in a recent investigation by AnandTech, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was found to have been optimized for specific benchmark tools.
These are the apps where the Galaxy S4 is instructed to run at full power:
- Quadrant (standard, advanced, and professional)
- Linpack (free)
- Benchmark Pi
- AnTuTu Benchmark
When these apps are running, the GPU of the Galaxy S4 is forced to run at 532MHz. Everything else, even graphics-intensive games, will only trigger a maximum GPU frequency of just 480MHz.
The same is true with the CPU (both Exynos 5 and Snapdragon 600) — when those benchmark apps are running, the system triggers the CPU to run at maximum frequency on all 4 cores.
In our review of the Galaxy S4, we saw the handset clocking in the highest scores in benchmark tests by Quadrant and Antutu.
This means that the environment in which regular apps and games would run on the Galaxy S4 is not the same as the settings put forth while running these specific bench-marking apps. While we cannot categorically conclude that Samsung is over-clocking their chips just to score higher/better in these benchmarks, there is certainly evidence of benchmark optimization.
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Just reacting to a post above that says “dahil nakaprogram ang processor ng s4 na hanggang dito lang sya dapat tumakbo”. That is inaccurate, that claim was never made in oiginal article. While the processor is tuned to clock lower than the maximum it can handle (for many obvious reasons), nothing is preventing apps from using this reserved and unused power if they can and they need to. So it’s like applications triggering the requirement.
The real trick here is that the phone is hardcoded to react to the benchmarking apps proactively, triggering the max cpu power by itself and for the benchmarking software.