HTC boosts One M8 benchmarks, calls it a feature

Shawn Knight

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htc android smartphone benchmark htc one m8

It’s no secret that nearly all Android OEMs “cheat” with regard to benchmarks. By cheating, I simply mean that they inject code that is used to detect if a benchmark application is running and pump up the CPU clock speeds to obtain the best possible score.

Late last year, several manufacturers were found guilty of the practice with Samsung being the most aggressive. So when benchmarks from the new HTC One M8 hit the web, some immediately questioned the “authenticity” of the results which managed to top every competing phone – including the Galaxy S5.

As it turns out, HTC has indeed optimized the M8 for benchmarks. But according to a company representative, they don’t see it as any kind of cheating but rather, a feature.

In an e-mailed statement to CNET, an HTC rep noted that for those with a need for speed, they’ve provided a simple way to unleash extra power by way of a new High Performance Mode. Interestingly enough, this mode is “hidden” in the developer settings and has to be enabled or disabled manually.

The rep goes on to point out that the M8 is optimized to provide the best balance of performance and battery life but they believe in offering customer choice, hence the new mode.

As if there weren’t enough variables to contend with already, the inclusion of a high performance mode will only help to muddle the waters even further with regard to mobile benchmarks. Truth be told, the practice is pretty much a waste of time as it has no effect on real-world performance and is done simply to make the device look more powerful in reviews.

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Ah here we go people will start calling it cheating for optimizing or overclocking because optimizing a device or overclocking a device is practically the same as killing a few people everyone just goes crazy over it.
 
Ah here we go people will start calling it cheating for optimizing or overclocking because optimizing a device or overclocking a device is practically the same as killing a few people everyone just goes crazy over it.

Moreso it's cheating being it looks for benchmark apps, and pushes everything to the max as a means to fake results. It's such a common occurance really that you have to question, the product makers as to why they do such things in the first place. Yes you topped the charts on a benchmark, but did you do it with more powerful hardware? Did you somehow make it more powerful all the while, making it more efficient to not drain the battery or did you basically rig the results?

I doubt everyone looks at benchmarks, to figure out if something is good for them. Sure it's a good idea but as we seen, many Android based devices don't play fair. So you might think it's some super cool phone / tablet, but in the end it might not be nearly as good. All in hopes of pushing sales really, is all they want to do anymore. Obviously this stunt will likely drive sales, but then people will likely complain of battery life.

Problem is with people these days, you want all your fancy toys but disregard battery life. Then complain half the time, when it doesn't make it through half the day without needing a recharge. Which then leads to people making a fuss, saying they were lied to among other stupid things. It's why the world is full of *****s, they blindly trust what they see or want things without a compromise. Oh well to each their own I guess.
 
Moreso it's cheating being it looks for benchmark apps, and pushes everything to the max as a means to fake results. It's such a common occurance really that you have to question, the product makers as to why they do such things in the first place. Yes you topped the charts on a benchmark, but did you do it with more powerful hardware? Did you somehow make it more powerful all the while, making it more efficient to not drain the battery or did you basically rig the results?

I doubt everyone looks at benchmarks, to figure out if something is good for them. Sure it's a good idea but as we seen, many Android based devices don't play fair. So you might think it's some super cool phone / tablet, but in the end it might not be nearly as good. All in hopes of pushing sales really, is all they want to do anymore. Obviously this stunt will likely drive sales, but then people will likely complain of battery life.

Problem is with people these days, you want all your fancy toys but disregard battery life. Then complain half the time, when it doesn't make it through half the day without needing a recharge. Which then leads to people making a fuss, saying they were lied to among other stupid things. It's why the world is full of *****s, they blindly trust what they see or want things without a compromise. Oh well to each their own I guess.

Your basically saying that all overclocking and optimizing should be made illegal... So optimizing hardware like what AMD/Nvidia/Intel/ARM etc. do should be made illegal by your standards right?

If you want to push the limits of something you are allowed to there is nothing wrong with it, if you want good battery life on a device GO FOR A OLD NOKIA!!!!! If you want a device that has tons of power and IS ABLE TO PUSH ITSELF MORE then you get one of the new phones with 1-2day battery life and NO phones are not gaming consoles stop using them as such!!!

Yes a phone can play games but if you expect 1month battery life out of it then you either a(stupid) or b(a genius that has invented a new battery) and no battery life isnt exactly improving the same way CPU/GPU's are improving sorry for your die hard old nokia brick phone mind set but this is 2014 not 1990.
 
Any site that does reviews finds this stuff right away. Anandtech called their benchmark page on their M8 reivew 'Subtle Cheating: New Benchmark Optimizations' The funny this is, Anandtech says "All of our benchmarks are already immune to the optimization, so it’s really a matter of sacrificing integrity for no real gain."

The benchmarks are far less important to most of us than actual descriptions of the phone's use. When Engadget says this...
A good personal benchmark for any given chipset's power is how little we actually notice it -- it just works. In other words, it's so smooth and snappy that we don't have to pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes. That's the case with the Snapdragon 801 running the show; we had to try hard to catch any failures, and even then we couldn't find anything sluggish enough to nitpick about here. We tried our darndest to make it crash by loading it with countless processor-intensive tasks and graphics-heavy games, but it stood its ground like a stubborn cow.
I pretty must just skip over the benchmark graphs anyway.


Truth be told, the practice is pretty much a waste of time as it has no effect on real-world performance and is done simply to make the device look more powerful in reviews.
Well... if it makes the device look more powerful in reviews, then it isn't a waste of time. And if you can manually turn on the 'high performance mode' that the benchmarks use, then it would have an effect of real-world performance (and battery life). I'd bet though that with it turned on you'll notice no improvement in performance and may notice a decrease in battery.
 
Dude, I don't think you get it. If you overclock your AMD/NVIDIA GPU or AMD/Intel CPU you'll be benefited across most applications, it's useful and you did it manually; overclocking automatically just for benchmarks -not for any other scenario which will represent the actual 99% of time usage- is giving a false impression and thus cheating, completely different, the user doesn't get a benefit from that.

This case is more similar to when Intel gave Haswell CPUs to reviewers that could achieve higher frequencies than what the average overclocker would ever get, thus making a false impression of being decent for overclocking.
 
Don't waste your time trying to explain HOW its cheating. Some just will never understand. You can say it in a way that appears so easy and simple to understand but they just don't get it.
 
Dude, I don't think you get it. If you overclock your AMD/NVIDIA GPU or AMD/Intel CPU you'll be benefited across most applications, it's useful and you did it manually; overclocking automatically just for benchmarks -not for any other scenario which will represent the actual 99% of time usage- is giving a false impression and thus cheating, completely different, the user doesn't get a benefit from that.

This case is more similar to when Intel gave Haswell CPUs to reviewers that could achieve higher frequencies than what the average overclocker would ever get, thus making a false impression of being decent for overclocking.


This is a tougher case though because of battery life; your computer CPU has no consideration. The phone makers turn down their processors to make the battery last longer. So what's more accurate... benchmarks that use a processor setting that you have to manually turn on? Or benchmarks that are based off of a processor speed the majority of users will be using? The latter of course, but I can understand why they do it. They do it because a) everyone else is doing it, and b) they're being 'graded' on benchmarks that are using an under-clocked processor.

It reminds me of MPG ratings in cars. They're to be used 'For Comparison use only.' If all the smartphone makers are turning their CPUs to max for the benchmarks (which they are), then we can still use the benchmarks for comparison. It's not like we're timing our app launches in milliseconds....

Honestly, I don't care... I have no idea how much faster a webpage is going to load between two phones with different javascript benchmark scores. This phone has the latest and greatest processor out and all reports say it's snappy, responsive and has terrific battery life. That's good enough for me.
Now I just need to check under my couch cushions for an extra $600 in loose change.
 
Well this all depends on how you look at it to see whether its cheating or not.

If you would take a normal GPU into account, they benchmark and run things with the boost clock which is a best case scenario so long as the temperature is within a recommended range. So essentially it would be like a program overriding the temperature threshold and allowing the boost clock to run no matter what (Within reason) just for the benchmark.

In all technicality, this is showing a best case scenario for the CPU on the phones by allowing the phone to run at its peak performance to show what it could be capable of. Now the problem before was that a mode like that would only be achievable on a phone while its plugged in because of battery meters and the system would not allow it to kill the phone battery. With the HTC M8, they allow this mode to be open to the developer which is nice if they want to make something graphically intensive that requires alot of power so this is more than fine.

I really don't see it as cheating, more of a best case scenario.
 
Seems like if everyone is increasing performance for the benchmarking apps, then the information is still relevent since everyone is doing it. Kind of like giving every student 10 points on a test. Is anyone really buying phones based on CPU benchmarks anyway? If you are worried about CPU and GPU benchmarks on a phone, you should probably get a game boy and a non-smart phone and save some money.
 
On the plus side, having the story about HTC 'cheating' on the benchmarks with the M8 does get it out and in the news again. Nothing wrong with a little free exposure for your phone, especially when many of those stories will have links in them to reviews. HTC will need all the help they can get to compete with Samsung's enormous marketing budget.
 
At least they opened up "high performance mode" to the developers rather than being secretly locked up like before.
 
Your basically saying that all overclocking and optimizing should be made illegal... So optimizing hardware like what AMD/Nvidia/Intel/ARM etc. do should be made illegal by your standards right?

I think you're missing the point entirely, that was stated in the article. It looks for a "benchmarking" app in particular, to give out false information about it's true performance. I've said nothing about overclocking or optimizing, to get the best out of a battery in that respect.

So would you like to know, if it falls below certain others based on it's hardware? I sure would but the whole issue is, Android devices see the apps and push everything to the max. Which is misleading in the end, because those specific apps don't purposely max out the hardware. It's a fake rating because of the detection, that's all my general point was.
 
I think you're missing the point entirely, that was stated in the article. It looks for a "benchmarking" app in particular, to give out false information about it's true performance. I've said nothing about overclocking or optimizing, to get the best out of a battery in that respect.

So would you like to know, if it falls below certain others based on it's hardware? I sure would but the whole issue is, Android devices see the apps and push everything to the max. Which is misleading in the end, because those specific apps don't purposely max out the hardware. It's a fake rating because of the detection, that's all my general point was.

Really? I just saw that it overclocks & optimizes the hardware but if it somehow fakes the data then ye it sounds bad.
 
Sounds legit. Flagships typically use the same SoC's anyway, so phone makers have to do something to make their product stand out.
 
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Its like if a car manufacturer published "This car will get 200 MPG" and then in the small print it says "you will never achieve this, this was done by going downgrade 2 degrees for 200 miles."

Could you get this 200MPG? yes if you found a stretch of highway where it was downhill for 200 miles. Its it a realistic representative of what the car get 100% of the other times it was driven? No.

False advertising 101.
 
To be honest the whole phone benchmark thing is now obsolete. Just like frame pacing, and minimum fps before it, hugely affected GPU benchmarks recently, it's time to re-write how phone benchmarks are performed.

I always found it odd that well-established sites that are experts in phone tech (esp. Android) post simple graphs for a single CPU test. Absolutely no mention of the CPU governor used, nor the clock speed attained.

Phones need to be benched with standard out-of-the-box settings (with no cheating by OEMs), and also once again in full-performance mode.
 
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