Futuremark delists Samsung, HTC smartphones guilty of fudging benchmarks

Futuremark delists Samsung, HTC smartphones guilty of fudging benchmarks

Benchmark scores have traditionally been one of the key tests that help reviewers and users understand the performance of their devices. While these scores were thought to be unbiased, a flood of data came in last month showing that almost every Android-based manufacturer was artificially inflating the performance of their devices to reflect a higher score. The only manufacturers that did not seem to be a part of this were Google and its subsidiary Motorola. The list includes the likes of Samsung, HTC and other major manufacturers. Benchmark vendors, in response to OEM’s fudging their device benchmark scores, have finally taken a public stand to condemn the practice. The first on the list to do so is Futuremark. According to its official post, the company has said a device suspected of breaking the rules of its online benchmark comparison tool, 3DMark, will be flagged and de-listed. De-listed devices will appear unranked, without scores, at the bottom of the 3D Mark Device Channel and the Best Mobile Devices list on the website for everyone to see.

Futuremark's list of guilty devices!

So far, devices that have been de-listed include the HTC One mini, the HTC One Max, the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 (2014 Edition). In case of the Samsung devices, both the Exynos 5 octa as well as the Qualcomm-based versions have been de-listed. There are no guarantees that this will prevent OEMs from continuing the practice, but it is gratifying to see that benchmark vendors are planning to publicly pull up those guilty of this action. Reports of Benchmark gaming first surfaced back in July when it was found that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 overclocked the GPU when running certain benchmarking applications like GLBenchmark 2.5.1, AnTuTu and Quadrant. Further tests revealed that the S4’s performance went up by almost 13.8 percent when running certain benchmarks. This practice was caused by an application that changes the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) behavior of the SoC to scale up the GPU clock if a benchmark app is run. Other models were found to employ similar tactics to bump up the CPU performance.

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