At the time when OnePlus is facing criticism from fans and geeks for overpriced smartphones and the merger with Oppo, we got another band news for the company. Andrei Frumusanu of AnandTech found OnePlus devices cheating on benchmarks.
It was found that OnePlus intentionally hinders browser performance. OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Proofreads throttles the performance of certain apps on the kernel level. So these apps cannot access the high-performance X1 core. Even if these apps get access to the X1 core, the clock speeds are limited to under 2.3 GHz. This results in about a 20% drop in the performance of Google Chrome versus what it should be on Snapdragon 888.
The report confirmed that this behavior was found affecting several popular apps including Chrome, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and most of Google’s apps.
So, users were not getting the performance they expect from a Snapdragon 888. One reason could be to improve power draw by limiting CPU performance. But this isn’t acceptable at all. The primary attraction of OnePlus devices is the powerful processor.
After this revelation, popular benchmark platform Geekbench delisted OnePlus and OnePlus 9 Pro promo Android benchmark charts.
OnePlus is yet to release an official statement. It is worth noting that Realme was also accused of fudging benchmark numbers. So, the AnTuTu benchmark banned Realme GT 5G.
