14 DAY TRIAL // It's been done before by companies bigger than Meizu and OnePlus, but it looks like some smartphone makers never learn from past mistakes. Samsung, HTC and a few other companies were found to artificially tweak the performance of the chipsets inside their smartphones to score high in various benchmark apps.
This happened a couple of years ago, so we thought that companies in the smartphone business gave up these practices, but it seems at least two have been found guilty of tampering with the benchmark results by tweaking their smartphones.
A couple of senior XDA forum users have teamed up with Geekbench, one of the benchmark apps that have been affected by these tweaks, to monitor how the Qualcomm chipset inside some OnePlus smartphones artificially “boost” the CPU clock speed when opening specific apps.
According to them, the OnePlus 3T's processor did not revert to its normal idling speeds after opening certain applications. Furthermore, the research team has found that OnePlus made the CPU function more aggressive in Geekbench.
“OnePlus was makings it CPU governor more aggressive, resulting in a practical artificial clock speed floor in Geekbench that wasn’t there in the hidden Geekbench build. It wasn’t based on the CPU workload, but rather on the app’s package name, which the hidden build could fool.”
Following these findings, OnePlus admitted that it made a couple of tweaks to how the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset inside the OnePlus 3T worked in certain apps. However, the Chinese company promised it would remove these tweaks in a future update.
“In order to give users a better user experience in resource intensive apps and games, especially graphically intensive ones, we implemented certain mechanisms in the community and Nougat builds to trigger the processor to run more aggressively. The trigger process for benchmarking apps will not be present in upcoming OxygenOS builds on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T.”
Meizu did not comment on the matter, but its Pro 6 flagship smartphone, which is equipped with a MediaTek chip, was found to cheat benchmark results as well.