One Plus and Meizu caught cheating on benchmark tests for better performance!

 Members from the XDA have confirmed that One Plus and Meizu have been artificially boosting performance in their benchmark tests. One Plus had even accepted their mistake and has promises not to do this in the future.

Given resistance from the community, we assumed that manufacturers valued their own community enough to avoid practices like this. It looks like One Plus and Meizu are unconcerned. 

While testing the OnePlus 3T, XDA noticed that the Snapdragon 821 chip used was forced to run at a higher clockspeed whenever a benchmark app was detected by adding lines of code in their operating systems. 

Assuming that One Plus was cheating on benchmark tests, XDA approached Primate Labs, the makers of the popular Geek-bench suite of benchmarks, for help. 

Primate Labs discovered that the OnePlus 3T’s OS was identifying apps by name and modifying the speed governors accordingly. To overcome this, Primate Labs built a benchmark with a different name. When tested on the OnePlus 3T, it was immediately noted that the chipset was performing as it normally should.

When the tests were run again, XDA noted that the difference in performance was minimal. In fact, the device ran hotter for no notable gain in performance.

It’s good that OnePlus atleast admitted this.

On the other hand the Meizu Pro 6 switches off the big cores most of the time. They only come on in certain apps and when the phone is explicitly placed in ‘Performance Mode’. The performance disparity was so great that scores fell by over 30 percent when Primate Labs’ secret benchmark was used. XDA believes that Meizu is also targeting apps by name.

Meizu is effectively selling you what it claims is a high-performance phone, but, for whatever reason, is throttling it down to the level of a mid-range phone.