Looking at CPU/GPU Benchmark Optimizations in Galaxy S 4
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
http://www.techspot.com/news/52274-samsung-admits-to-posting...
I don't understand why people keep buying this company's god damn products. I mean, holy shit.
Anyone who's used a S3/S4 knows most of the S-"features" are pure gimmicks that a fairly competent engineer could implement in less than a week. HTC phones are much more sturdy and better designed, IMO.
I was vacationing in Hong Kong earlier this month, and the subway stations were just completely plastered with various 15-foot tall Galaxy posters. Some of the features they were promoting were just laughable - simultaneous photos with the front and back camera composed into a picture-in-picture result? Really?
I really wanted this feature for a long time and wondered why phones that had 2 cameras did not allow it.
It was specially useful when taking photos of my 1 year old daughter. It helps capture our emotions at the same time we were capturing her. So now you can see photos where she is trying to learn walking and at the same time see my face that is at times smiling (when she walks couple of steps) and at times scared (when she is about to fall) in the photos.
Samsung galaxy s phones have generally good hardware compared to the competition as well as a few really important hardware features which their competitors don't have (all of the features at once, that is): 4g lte support, a removable battery, and (for me the deal(maker||breaker)) an SD card slot. Those aren't just gimmicks. They're real differences. Many people like me really care.
I couldn't care less about the default software - there are a wide range of roms which address most (unfortunately not all for super picky people like myself) issues you might have.
But as far as why people keep buying the products: sadly it's because they're better. I'm looking at the GS4 (i9505, not the Exynos one) right now vs. the HTC One and Xperia Z. On paper, they're all basically the same phone (2G quad core snapdragons with 1920x1080 screens). But all the tiebreakers (really, all of them) go to the Samsung phone. The GS4 is slightly smaller, thinner, and lighter yet its screen is slightly larger. It's CPU is clocked higher and its battery is larger. It's cameras are better (much more so than the HTC, slightly more so than the Sony). It has a removable battery where the others don't. It has a sdcard slot where the HTC doesn't. It supports the "T-Mobile" HSPA+-on-AWS-band frequencies. It has a thermometer, hygrometer and barometer built-in.
It's just a better phone on everything quantifiable. Not so much so as to kill the competition, but to anyone paying attention and recommending hardware to their friends, they're doing an awful lot right.
so still why? advertizing .... average user would look to the numbers and buy it (as somehow people have started to realize are the same...)
Could you elaborate on that? Is it just the visual part that you don't like? I'm planning to get one soon, just seen one in a shop. The screen is beautiful and specs seem to be quite promising too. Can't wait to get my hands on it and code up some experiments.
Every other thing about this phone is also terrible. The way the phone sits on your hand, the material, the interface etc.
Ultimately, the closed ecosystem of the iPhone with a lot of random up charges for things like a second charger $30+, lockin through iTunes, lack of compatibility with PC and a much smaller screen steered me a way from the iPhone.
When it came down to the HTC One vs S4, the choice was pretty clear. I grabbed a waterproof S4 which is about the same size as the HTC one and the S4 has a replaceable battery.
To be honest, each phone has major pluses and minuses, and there is no perfect phone anymore. There are days I wish I had the iPhone, but, overall the S4 is a dramatic improvement over the S2 which is a dramatic improvement over the BlackBerry Torch, which is a dramatic improvement over the Windows Treo which is a dramatic improvement over the pocket PC (Don't even get me started about the pocket PC).
I think we can all be glad phone technology has gotten this good. Its really amazing. Any top of the line phone bought today is dramatically better than any phone bought even 3 years ago.
[added] For the comment below, I have been swimming with mine twice, I also like to take it out while I'm drinking and drop it in my beer to watch people's reactions. Doing so does make the bottom buttons stick for a few days, but the phone works.
Sealing it is difficult. You need to take about 2 min to make sure the back is on properly and it takes a bit more force than you are use to.
But, yes, mine is waterproof. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some defective models. Its not like people are writing reddit posts about all the cool stuff they do with their S4 actives.
Huh? There is nothing about the iPhone that is incompatible with PCs. iTunes runs a little slow on Windows but that's pretty much it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6747/htc-one-review/4
Every phone has its features. It's just at a point where a simple chart-by-chart comparison won't work for most people anymore. Practically every reviewer likes the One despite the fact that on paper it's a downgrade to the S4 in every way. Basically, it is like you said, the devil is in the details, but bigger is not necessarily better.
Personally, out of those three phones, I'd rather go with the HTC One only because I like the aluminum body chassis (along with how the screen looks) and the fact that their stock Android version is 50 dollars cheaper than Samsung's. The decently sized front speakers are also a plus. I very much dislike the look of the GS4 and TouchWiz which, in comparison with HTC's Sense, has less cooler whistles and doodads IMO. But ultimately I like stock Android the best.
The beats audio chip on the One is a con for me though (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdbn_pmxFic).
I haven't given the Xperia Z much of a chance, but aside from the fact that it looks aesthetically pleasing to me and I can use it while showering, I don't see much of an advantage. The GS4 came out with a water and dust resistant version, but it's slightly bigger and the audio jack is off so it won't fit most S4 cases. The Z's overlay is much more stock Android (GS4 version is TouchWiz only). So I'll pick it over Samsung because of that.
Basically, I really don't like TouchWiz. For the most part it just feels cluttered and half baked and a pain to use.
I'm not saying you couldn't possibly decide to buy an non-Samsung phone. I'm responding to a poster who claimed incredulity that someone could.
> I don't understand why people keep buying this company's god damn products. I mean, holy shit.
And you responeded that the SG4 had some better metrics than it's competition, but did no consider what made a better phone. Benchmark apps are one of those metrics that people consider, and has now shown to be misleading.
Even the higher CPU freq doesn't mean app performance is better, or even that general user experience is better.
Stop it with the metrics!
And why would anyone choose a phone they could get coverage on from multiple carriers in the US? That's just "marketing" gibberish, right?
Do you really think they can change suddenly? I don't think so. Copying and faking is internal system and philosophy of Samsung, can it won't be changed.
Hyperbole much?
Because they make very decent phones that can easily be made to run alternative Android operating systems that allow me to do whatever I like with my phone.
For example, you can't plug a USB Software Defined Radio (SDR) module into an iPhone to monitor and decode spectrum.
Is a little extreme. This is what companies do in the computer biz. Nvidia, ATI have been doing this BS for decades now. As cscheid said it's quack.exe all over again.
If they just gave the user the option to enable this performance tweak for games, I wouldn't mind. The problem is it's only enabled for benchmarks.
Others also do cannot justify anything.
As an Android developer I really appreciate what Samsung did in raising the bar for Android devices, and really bringing them to the mass market. High quality Android devices have been around for awhile, but it was far more common to see most people walking around with the low-mid tier Android phones. Samsung made it "cool" to own an S3, and now you can release and know that many of your users will actually own a solid Android device.
In an era where patent trolling is rampant, an exaggerated benchmark of this nature is sadly, child's play. And it certainly would not have stopped me from buying the product if I was in market.
Ars is right that this isn't new. I remember ATI being caught in the Quake/Quack thing [2] a dozen years ago.
[1] - http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview-ads...
[2] - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...
Boy that dates me, apart from the fact this was NT maybe 3.5 or so, what happened to PC trade shows?
If that is the case, then I fail to see anything immoral. Bad engineering - yes - but there's nothing immoral in arbitrarily boosting the GPU to run the browser or the camera smoother. (and once you regularly do this for some standard apps, it would also be appropriate to run benchmarks with the fastest speed)
Link: http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4574210/samsung-benchmark-...
Edit: I also don't understand why anyone would investigate with a hex editor. (like Anandtech does)
Samsung is quite open with its Android devices, and regularly releases the source code (Link: http://opensource.samsung.com/) It also would be quite strange to cheat, and then release the source code so everyone can see.
The binaries were on the device, but the source code was not, so the binaries are a natural place to begin the investigation.
Is it ever clear which source from http://opensource.samsung.com/ is on the device Brian was investigating?
Anyways, what I would have liked to see in this article is if the Intent they are referring to (the one that triggers the increase of the GPU clock) is only used for cheating on benchmarks, or actually a feature that is used on many apps - not just speculation/baseless accusation.
Having read the article, it is clear that it is not baseless speculation.
Two benchmarks running the same code, but with a different name. One runs faster than the other. The one that runs faster has it's name hardcoded in the samsung binaries.
You are right that the source code could show a fuller picture, but I'd say this is an example of good reporting and not speculation.
http://anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchmark-o...
My only point is that I personally feel that more investigation is needed in that direction before I'll feel very negatively about the story. If it's a rarely used but possible mode, it seems like it's on the same level as disabling power saving mode when running a recognized benchmark. I kinda expect benchmarks to represent the peak attainable performance, even if it's not the typical performance.
When those particular programs are benchmarks and the path is coded specifically to boost performance on a unique set of said benchmarks in contrast to the most common use cases, that's an issue regardless of whether or not you can imagine an outlier real-world scenario that utilizes a code path that tweaks the performance.
You have to bend over backwards to see that as anything other than dishonest.
"Our new hot device has this awesome performance mode but those benchmarks aren't aware for it and it won't be utilized in the device reviews. So let's make sure it's used in these benchmark applications."
If they just flip the switches available to every developer/application it's not necessarily dishonest just tech marketing.
2. Otherwise, if it require the application to be aware to utilize this feature, then why hasn't Samsung announce this "mode" to developer to utilize it yet?
Also, benchmarks are designed to compare apples to apples, so if, as you suggest, the high-performant mode wouldn't be triggered by benchmark use-cases normally, then hard coding the exception is dishonest, as the only explanation is turning your apple into an orange.
It is incredibly dishonest, and there is simply no rationalizing it -- they are cheating, and everyone involved with this is kind of a scumbag.
> Today, we are large enough to avoid these petty discussions of withholding review samples. Most manufacturers know that one way or another we'll get our hands on a product for review and don't try to play these sorts of games. Rarely we are faced with a manufacturer or advertiser who is looking to influence our content. We have a firm internal policy in place to deliver honest, balanced reviews to the best of our ability - regardless of external pressures. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, we have been around long enough and are large enough to avoid this being an issue in the vast majority of situations.
[checkbox] Enable "High performance option"? Caution: will drain battery life and may cause device to overheat!!
You should treat benchmarks with a heavy pinch of salt, simply because it's caught up in the bullshit messaging world of marketing where the aim is just to produce the bigger or smaller number where appropriate.
The necessity to satisfy marketing ignores a lot of things. Benchmarks often translate poorly to real use.
Does GLbenchmark 2.7 provide any useful insight into the performance of the top fifty games in the Android mobile market? Probably not with a few 3d heavy exceptions.
Some benchmarks will never die, you'll still see Dhrystone trotted out to this day. http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20090602_coremark...
And then you hit a grey area where software can behave badly on one piece of hardware versus the other because of implementation. So if the benchmark hits this area, is it a hardware problem or a benchmark software problem?
There are some errors induced through the act of measuring, but power consumption and thermal profile checks would cut down on the amount of CPU/GPU benchmark tampering.
Despite the truly ridiculous claims to the contrary, the iPhone has always been about specs, where in many cases it is the leader (such as having the perennial market leading GPUs)