OnePlus has finally launched their next flagship phone OnePlus 5. In just a few hours of official launch, technology space was filled with OnePlus 5 reviews. People who are interested in this phone also started looking at reviews to know about performance and benchmark results. If you are one of those who also trusts benchmark scores to judge a phone, you should keep reading.
According to new reports, OnePlus is cheating on benchmarks to boost the Benchmark scores of OnePlus 5. The same thing they did with OnePlus 3T as well. Unfortunately, they have not learned and tried to cheat again.
XDA developers found virtual ‘doping’ during benchmarks. OnePlus 5 review units have a mechanism to maximize the Snapdragon 835 SoC’s performance during synthetic benchmarks. It means every single review you have read has the misleading benchmark results.
The cheating mechanism keeps four of the cores in the Snapdragon 835’s octa-core CPU running at their maximum 1.9GHz frequency constantly. When this mechanism is disabled, the said cores run on their maximum 1.9GHz frequency only 24.4% of the time.
Below is a list of benchmark applications affected:
- AnTuTu (com.antutu.benchmark.full)
- Androbench (com.andromeda.androbench2)
- Geekbench 4 (com.primatelabs.geekbench)
- GFXBench (com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark27)
- Quadrant (com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.standard)
- Nenamark 2 (se.nena.nenamark2)
- Vellamo (com.quicinc.vellamo)
These are the same apps that were affected last time when OnePlus was caught cheating on Benchmark scores.
OnePlus also responded to this and said that they wanted to show the true performance capabilities of the OnePlus 5. You can read the exact reply from OnePlus on XDA Developers article.
Their reply shows that they did it intentionally. And they are putting the device into a state which is explicitly not how the device will run in normal usage. They tried to boost the benchmark scores just to show that OnePlus 5 is better with the same chipset than rivals.
This is disappointing and they did it twice. I hope they will take this seriously and will remove the benchmark cheating code from their software. OnePlus has a huge fan base but they are heading in the wrong direction. This kind of cheap things can give a sudden boost but the company will surely lose loyal fans.
What are your thoughts on this benchmark-cheating by OnePlus? Let us know your views in the comments below.
