There’s been a bit of a scandal concerning Samsung and the results it gets in benchmarks, especially after it was discovered that Samsung Galaxy 4’s GPU upgrades its performance when the device is running the AnTuTu benchmark. Now the Galaxy Note 3 is doing pretty much the same thing.
The folks of Ars Technica have uncovered this through a series of tests and digging around software. They started noticing something weird when the Galaxy Note 3 and its 2.3 GHz Snapdragon 800 CPU got a much bigger benchmark score compared to the LG G2, that has exactly the same 2.3 GHz Snapdragon 800 CPU. Samsung is artificially boosting the US Note 3’s benchmark scores by using a high power CPU mode that’s activated once you start a variety of benchmarks.
There’s also a way to disable the special CPU mode, but still the Note 3 is able to score more than the LG G2 even like this. The CPU idle speeds are the ones proving something’s wrong and they can be viewed with a system monitor app while using the handset. Ars Technica has found a file that triggers the boost behaviour and its code mentions some popular benchmark names like Quadrant, AnTuTu, Linpack, GFXBench and such.
Samsung is also doing something to the GPU, with “frame rate adjustment”. Not nice Sammy, not nice…
