The initial performance benchmarks for the HTC One M8 were very impressive, blowing away most of the competition, including Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S5. People were suspicious of such good numbers based on the hardware, however, and it turns out their concerns were somewhat founded. HTC was fine-tuning phones that were being tested to optimize performance, producing greater results than the average user will normally see.
This isn't outright cheating, though, and the phone maker has actually turned it into something consumers can take advantage of. HTC says it optimized the phone to get the maximum power from the CPU and GPU when running a benchmark tests, and users can manually enable a High Performance Mode that allows the same amount of power.
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"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," HTC told CNET.
"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. 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."
Using this High Performance Mode will definitely not do any favors to your battery life, but HTC acknowledges that users will sometimes need more power, even at that cost.
"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."
So, they may have inflated the numbers for benchmarks, but only from what people using the normal functionality of the phone will see--the hardware is still capable of those numbers. If you ever need more power and don't need to preserve your battery, the option is there.
