Some of the latest updates to the Cyanogenmod 11 code show that the team will be adding in a set of performance profiles in future builds. The idea behind the performance profiles will be to scale up the power and performance of the CPU and GPU(or scale them down)depending on needs, although currently the code that’s been written will only allow for specific apps to take advantage of the performance profiles. In time, Cyanogenmod plans to add in the ability for users to configure specifically which apps they want to take advantage of a certain performance boost. In addition to adding in performance profiles, Cyanogen’s “TODO” list includes implementing an advanced power saving mode which we presume would work similar to the way the power save modes work on the Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8.
The performance profiles are a great idea, think of it like overclocking your phones CPU/GPU to run faster, only this would work on a more individualized level and on an app to app basis eventually. Currently the only apps set up to receive such treatment once this code is written into the latest nightly builds and beyond, are two of the most popular benchmarking applications available to test phone performance, which are AnTuTu and Quadrant. Essentially what this will end up doing is boosting the benchmark scores for both of those benchmark tests beyond what devices would have scored normally without the lift from the performance profile running. This isn’t too different from what Samsung and HTC both did with their flagship devices.(Samsung did this last year while HTC was caught doing it this year with the HTC One M8)
The only reason this comes up as an issue for some is because of the belief that these benchmark scores will be artificially inflated, or inaccurate. Those thoughts wouldn’t be too far off although inaccurate wouldn’t really be correct, as the scores would be reflected based off of the performance of the devices running said profile while the benchmark test was going. Until CyanogenMod implements a user level configuration for the use of the performance profiles for other apps as well though it would be unlikely that anyone would notice a boost in performance when using anything other than AnTuTu or Quadrant, making this look like the addition is solely to boost scores in those benchmark tests. What’s possible though is that Cyanogen Could be using this as a test for the capability of performance profiles to be implemented on a system wide level later on, which would give users the option to turn on the ability to boost performance when using certain apps that could benefit from higher performance like games. Whatever the reason for implementing this ability for the benchmark apps first, if users can end up using this function with any apps they choose in the future, it should be a welcome change.