Samsung caught gaming benchmarks with Galaxy S4 | Hacker News Reader

Samsung caught gaming benchmarks with Galaxy S4

androidauthority.com

59 pointsyapcguy11 comments

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my Dad as a kid... Why would someone, who is already quite wealthy, risk everything and partake in something illegal to get even richer?

I'm wondering the same thing now... why would Samsung risk tarnishing their name when the GS4 is already considered the fastest mobile device in existence?

The only thing I can think of is that they could care less about their integrity or corporate image... they simply need to focus on catering to a tech-obsessed population with the fastest, highest resolution beast of a handset, everything else be damned.

What's wrong with a few "hardware optimized" apps to ensure that crown sits atop a Samsung device a bit longer?

They were caught posting fake negative user reviews on competing devices before. So they don't really have much in the way of integrity already...

Yeah because apple only gives away all your privacy to the NSA, they have heaps more integrity.

Oh that's right, Apple are American, not Korean... americans are never evil, and always full of integrity. .... But those Koreans!

Why don't we just stop pretending any of these companies have 'integrity' and admit they are just cold businesses competing for money... they are not people with moral codes. They are capitalist entities looking for $$$.

In somewhat related news.

Google caught using misleading report to claim Nexus 7 outsold iPad in Japan

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/30/google-caught-usin...

Here's the actual source of the story as opposed to the linked blog site: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchma...

I can't say I feel a great sense of outrage. GPU makers have been doing way worse for longer (intentionally degrading image quality during benchmarks, for instance). The point of the benchmark is that it shows what the device can do at its peak potential, and what they're doing... is running the device at its peak potential. Yeah; I know: it doesn't normally run that fast, but at least it /could/ run that fast if you don't care about battery life and heat dissipation and other things the benchmark doesn't measure.

But could it? Does any other app have these frequencies available?

No they don't, so it doesn't show anything more than theoretical potential. Potential that is not available to customers. So it's a form a fraud really.

More active discussion on the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131136

This indicates not a problem with Samsung, but a problem with the benchmarks.

Want better devices? Build better benchmarks.

This isn't a better-benchmarks problem because the problem isn't that they're optimizing specific instructions that only the benchmarks use, instead they're looking at the name of the application and cranking up the speed if the name matches a known benchmarking application to make it look like non-benchmark apps can run faster than they really can.

This is fraud IMO, regardless of if the GPU industry has been doing it for years. Being well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no measure of health.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com