Is your device cheating on benchmarks? Here's how to find out

As time has gone by, so has people's reliance on benchmarks as a dependable and authentic tool for actual performance gauging. So much so, actually, that there are now those who would rather completely dismiss their usefulness (yes, they are useful, read on), and simply refuse to try and understand why it is that benchmarks are still exactly as relevant and exactly as dependable as they ever were. "How is that?", you may wonder, and that's a fair question, seeing as pretty much every major manufacturer has been caught red-handed trying to cheat their way to the top of the benchmark ladders. This has served to obfuscate the relative value of those tools. The truth is, benchmarks still have their role to play -- they're relatively rigid (i.e. standardized) in their approach, and a select few of them are actually pretty good at forecasting real-life results. In fact, if you spend your time benchmarking smartphones every other day, and then using them, it won't be at all that long until you start seeing the patterns that emerge. Are benchmarks foolproof? Heck no. They never were, and never will be. But they still play a role, and once you get used to their particular weaknesses and understand the infinite value of cross-benching, you start enjoying the fruit of your efforts and knowledge. Given enough practice, you'll start understating that these otherwise abstract scores should rarely be seen as absolutes, but rather -- as relative figures.