Last year several of the phone makers got caught out cheating when it came to Android benchmark tests, these included Samsung, Asus, HTC and LG. they are all guilty of boosting up the clock ratings for handsets when running specific benchmarks. Futuremark too devices found to be cheating in the score off their 3DMark performance rankings.
“That decision won us lots of praise from 3DMark users, even from those who owned one of the delisted models,” said Jani Joki, director of engineering at Futuremark.
After the update to KitKat 4.4 Futuremark has said that the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Samsung Galaxy Note III now confirm to the guidelines of the benchmark.
“We knew that delisting would send a message to manufacturers too. We hoped it would encourage them to be fair and honest with their customers,” Joki added. “I am happy to say that our actions have paid off.”
For the Samsung Galaxy S4 the 3DMark score were valid when running Android 4.2.2, 4.4x or later and they were delisted when running on Android 4.3 or 4.3.1.
For the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 the scores are valid when the handset is running Android 4.4.2 or later and delisted when it runs Android 4.3.
With KitKat 4.4 there are some huge performance gains when running KitKat 4.4. Jelly Bean 4.3 is still the leader for overall score but the numbers have been tainted by the artificially boosted clock frequency. Scores from KitKat 4.4 show an improvement when it comes down to the graphics performance, over Android 4.2.2 and 4.3.
When testing there was another quirk found in KitKat 4.4 and this is that the Samsung Galaxy S4 ROM throttles the SoC more aggressively than when on 4.2 and 4.3.
