When Samsung was accused of cheating in benchmarks on the Galaxy S4 by making its hardware run at higher clock speeds when benchmark apps were run, people were quick to jump at the chance of throwing curses and insults at the Korean manufacturer. That stopped when it was discovered that almost every manufacturer does the same cheating in benchmarks, a fact that even more strongly proved that benchmarks are never an indication of how the device will perform in actual usage.
Well, now a startup called GameBench, whose founders previously worked at chip companies like ARM and MediaTek, have come up with a “uncheatable” benchmark that can be used to discover the true gaming capabilities of a device, while corroborating the scores given to devices by other benchmark apps. GameBench's app (currently in beta) was used to test both the Galaxy S4 and HTC One in gaming performance, and it turned out that Samsung's “fake” benchmark scores are actually closer to its real-life performance than other devices (in this case, the HTC One's).
GameBench's app runs in the background while an actual game is being played and takes numerous measurements, including the frame rate and amount of battery drain. While the S4 was a bit heavier on the battery, it delivered smoother frame rates in four different games. In Real Racing 3, the Galaxy S4 delivered a frame rate of 26, considerably ahead of the One's 21 fps; meanwhile, in Minion Rush, which is nowhere near as graphically advanced as Real Racing 3 but still has a lot of things going on on the screen at any time, the S4 scored almost 30 points in frame rate, while the One was far behind with only 19 fps.
Of course, these differences in frame rate can be attributed to how a game is optimized for a particular device (Dead Trigger delivers almost the same framerates in both, which is not surprising since Dead Trigger is one of the most optimized games that has ever been released for Android), and the S4 is also running a higher clocked version of the Snapdragon 600 chipset that powers both devices, but one thing is certain: Samsung might be fooling everyone when it comes to benchmarks, but its devices are still capable of actually providing performance in real life that is closer to that exhibited by benchmark apps.
