After various reports and reviews revealed that HTC’s new One (M8) smartphone may be cheating in some benchmarks – the phone boots performance when certain benchmarks are detected – the company has confirmed to CNET that it indeed handles benchmark apps differently than regular apps, although it said it doesn’t see this as cheating.
“Benchmarking tests look to determine maximum performance of the CPU and GPU and, similar to the engine in a high-performance sports car, our engineers optimize in certain scenarios to produce the best possible performance,” the company told the publication in a statement. “If someone would like to get around this benchmarking optimization there are ways to do so, but we think most often this will not be the case.”
HTC also said that it’s not only benchmark apps that can take advantage of the HTC One (M8)’s maximum performance, as there’s a way to enable a “High Performance Mode” on the handset, a feature also discovered in one of the reviews detailing HTC’s optimizing procedures for benchmark tests.
“For those with a need for speed, we’ve provided a simple way to unleash this power by introducing a new High Performance Mode in the developer settings that can be enabled and disabled manually,” the company said. “The HTC One (M8) is optimized to provide the best balance of performance and battery life, but we believe in offering customer choice, as there may be times when the desire for performance outweighs the need for battery longevity.”
The mode is not available to U.S. devices for the time being, but it will arrive via a future software update.
