Android Benchmark Cheating is more common than you think

Just the other day we found out that Samsung was up to its old tricks inflating the new Note 3 benchmarks using controversial tactics. But unfortunately it seems that this was become a widespread problem across the industry, with other manufacturers adopting similar tactics.


According to the site Anandtech, there alre lots of other devices that detect when you're running specific benchmarks and set the CPU and GPU for high-performance modes. Just to be clear, I have nothing against smartphones and tablets having high-performance modes; what I can't accept though, is that these special modes aren't accessible to the user and are only used specifically for a number of benhcmark apps. This clearly shows "intent" in rigging the system to get a few extra points over the competition, with a performance you won't be able to use in any other case.

Asus, HTC, LG, Samsung, are just a few of those that have been caught cheating - with the exception being Motorola and Google's own Nexus devices. So... there you have it, why your Nexus 4 may be slower in benchmarks than a similar spec'ed Samsung or LG.

Wouldn't it be better for manufacturers to worry more about fixing bugs and providing a hassle free user experience (not to mention timely updates!) rather than wasting time and resources cheating benchmarks? I certainly think so, and this serves as one extra thing I'll be sure to point out next time some one asks me what smartphone or tablet they should buy.

10 Years of 3D Graphics Evolution

With the latest arrival of 3D Mark 11, showcasing everything DirectX 11 has to offer and taking it to the limit, I think it would be interesting to see how much we've come along in the past 10 years, from DirectX 7 to Direct X11.

It's no secret graphic cards have evolved greatly in this decade, more so than regular "CPUs", and this serves to prove it:



(I still remember watching these demos run - or should I say, crawl - over the years... :)

With 3D Mark 11, never have we seen such realistic and life-like images rendered in our computer screens.

Unigine Heaven 3D DX11 Benchmark

This Unigine Heaven Demo is a great demo that shows some of the new DirectX 11 features, such as tesselation.

With tesselation on, the graphic card can automatically fill in the "details" for low polygon count 3D models.

You can see it in action in the following video:




And the beautiful  Heaven demo itself:

Hard disk and Ram Disk Benchmarks

I finally got to benchmark the hard drives in my new PC. (I should have done it, but things keep popping up delaying my "plans.")

Well, here it is now, the disk benchmarks with HDTune.

Both 500GB Seagate disks behave approximately, averaging about 100MB/s transfer rates:

The other 1TB Seagate doesn't stray away from it too much.

Now, I still haven't decide if I go back to using a Raid 0 setup and double the transfer rates; or if I delay it a bit more and then go for a SSD drive... (decisions, decisions...)

Whatever the case, nothing will come close to my 4GB Ram drive:

 3.8GB/s transfer rate and 0ms access time! Now that's how all storage devices should be! :)