Samsung Caught Boosting Galaxy S4 Benchmarks

[wraggster]

A recent forum post (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1760026#post1760026) at Beyond3D made an interesting claim: that the Samsung Galaxy S4's GPU ran at 532 MHz for certain whitelisted benchmark applications, and at 480 MHz for everything else (http://anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchmark-optimizations-galaxy-s-4). The folks at AnandTech decided to investigate and found out that the phone does indeed let its GPU run at a higher frequency when particular benchmark software is running. They found a similar oddity with the CPU — it wasn't restricted for other apps, but it was forced to run at max speed during benchmarks. Then they decided to look for direct evidence that this was intentional."Poking around I came across the application changing the DVFS behavior to allow these frequency changes – TwDVFSApp.apk. Opening the file in a hex editor and looking at strings inside (or just running strings on the .odex file) pointed at what appeared to be hard coded profiles/exceptions for certain applications. The string 'BenchmarkBooster' is a particularly telling one. ... Quadrant standard, advanced, and professional, linpack (free, not paid), Benchmark Pi, and AnTuTu are all called out specifically. Nothing for GLBenchmark 2.5.1 though, despite its similar behavior.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/31/041250/samsung-caught-boosting-galaxy-s4-benchmarks