Samsung has responded to our report presenting evidence that it artificially inflates benchmark scores. Today, the electronics giant contacted CNET UK to deny specifically boosting benchmark scores, saying:

The Galaxy Note 3 maximises its CPU/GPU frequencies when running features that demand substantial performance. This was not an attempt to exaggerate particular benchmarking results. We remain committed to providing our customers with the best possible user experience.

We contacted Samsung for comment both before and after we published our findings, but the company never responded to us except to acknowledge via its PR group that it had received our questions. We would have liked to see the company address the specific evidence we provided, namely that its CPU throttling code contains a hardcoded list of popular benchmark apps. Samsung claims that it boosts other apps as well, but the list of apps in the throttling code we presented is exclusively benchmarks. Our report focused on Geekbench, a benchmark used in our reviews, and found that editing the APK and renaming the package name revealed that the optimizations boosted the score by 20 percent.

After our findings were published, Anandtech wrote its own piece on the subject, saying the majority of manufacturers optimize for at least one benchmark. Anandtech's table shows that Samsung is the biggest offender, with the Note 3 being the first device to optimize for nearly every benchmark. Samsung's response here mirrors its earlier response to the Galaxy S 4 benchmarking controversy, where it also stated that other apps were boosted. This time, though, we have Samsung's actual code, and the list of boosted apps doesn't contain anything but benchmarks.