OnePlus And Meizu Found To Have Fudged Benchmarks

In the past when devices are spotted on benchmarks ahead of their official reveal, we sometimes caution that even benchmarks can be faked. Recently it seems that the folks at XDA have uncovered something rather disturbing, which is that both OnePlus and Meizu have been fudging their benchmark scores.

For the average consumer who doesn’t bother checking benchmarks, this isn’t that big of a deal. However we guess for companies to fake or artificially boost their benchmark scores to make it seem like their device is more powerful than others is not very good practice. In fact if you might recall, several years ago quite a few Android OEMs were similarly caught.

According to XDA, “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.”

However the good news is that OnePlus was quick to cop to it when it was pointed out to them, and they promised they would remove these tweaks in future updates for more accurate benchmarking scores. “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.”

That being said we guess there is a lesson here, and that is sometimes benchmarks don’t always matter when it comes to judging a phone’s performance or its capabilities, and that using it in real-life and seeing how it fares might be a better way.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Meizu, OnePlus