HTC have been caught with their virtual pants down yet again, after being caught red handed boosting their device performance specifically to top the charts on benchmarking last year, HTC’s latest flagship the One (M8) has been found to have the same performance enhancing software in the operating system.
The Antutu 4 benchmarks show the HTC One (M8) not just beating but thoroughly creaming the opposition with a score of 38,815 where the Antutu X (showing a true representation of the device capabilities rather than boosted performance) shows that the new HTC One doesn’t even surpass a generation old Samsung Galaxy S4.
Cnet questioned HTC about the discrepancies between the results and received the following response:
Thanks for your email about the HTC One (M8). Benchmarking tests look to determine maximum performance of the CPU and GPU and, similar to the engine in a high-performance sports car, our engineers optimize in certain scenarios to produce the best possible performance. If someone would like to get around this benchmarking optimization there are ways to do so, but we think most often this will not be the case.
This opinion from HTC is in stark contrast to the views of purists who expect benchmarks to be conducted in “normal operating conditions”, not “let’s strap a turbo to it for the tests, call that a norm then take the turbo off while you use it”. It’s almost like HTC were a bit slow off the mark and decided that it was a really good idea to excel in benchmarks.
Have HTC gone too far with this deception of users with boosted performance, or is it just another case of a manufacturer fudging the numbers to make their device look a little more attractive?
Actually the M8 is cleaner than the rest because it allows the high performance mode to be enabled system-wide under developer options.