Last year, the Galaxy S4 and a few other handsets were caught cheating in benchmarks to post higher scores. This led many benchmarking suites to delist some of the Samsung and HTC handsets and also gained the companies a fair bit of negative publicity. 

With the new generation of flagship handsets being released, many hoped that Samsung and HTC would stop boosting the CPU/GPU clocks to score higher benchmark scores. Sadly, as it turns out, HTC still thinks that its neccessary to use some under-the-hood tweaks cheat while running benchmarks to gain higher scores. In its latest flagship — the One (M8) — the company has once again tweaked the governor to deliver more than optimal performance while running benchmarks.

Whenever the governor on the handset detects that a benchmark has been started, it responds much more aggressively to any increase in load. According to AnandTech’s finding, the average CPU frequency is about 15% higher on the One (M8) with any benchmark app that has been whitelisted in the firmware files.

Unlike last year though, the bump in frequency is only limited to the CPU and does not affect the GPU at all. It is also interesting to note that HTC has actually provided users with the option (albeit hidden) to run the device in high performance mode, if they wish to. The option can be enabled by going into Developer options and enabling “High Performance Mode”.