When we talk about most smartphones, and look at performance, we have to be wary that some smartphone manufacturers like to game the system. They will have in their software stack a detection algorithm such that if it notices specific benchmarks, and usually only benchmarks, then it will artificially boost the CPU and GPU frequencies higher than normal, as well as increase any thermal limits. We call this cheating – it represents an unrealistic level of performance that the user is not likely to see. We call out any smartphone that does this, and it has being going on a while.
Some smartphones, and gaming phones, actually now offer this ‘high performance’ mode as an option to the end user. For normal smartphone use, we test these modes depending on their behaviour. Some vendor’s high performance mode is quite blatantly disregarding normal DVFS operations when in such modes, which we consider just a public-facing cheating mode, while other vendors just more aggressively scale performance whilst still having a resonable DVFS configuration.
ASUS’s X Mode looks to be one of the more honestly implemented performance modes as it still allows the device to idle its frequencies correctly. On top of that, because it’s a gaming phone it’s definitely something we want to test. And even more importantly than that, with ASUS at least, additional accessories are included or can be purchased to remove the issue of thermals altogether, either with more cooling, or by putting the device into a dock.
For the ASUS ROG Phone II, this extra performance mode is called ‘X Mode’, and is very extensive.
asus rog 