OnePlus 9 Pro caught cheating in benchmark scores, gets removed from Geekbench – Times of India

Performance benchmarking platform Geekbench has delisted the OnePlus 9 Pro and OnePlus 9 smartphones after a report by AnandTech revealed that the OnePlus 9 Pro smartphone was manipulating benchmarking scores.
“It’s disappointing to see OnePlus handsets making performance decisions based on application identifiers rather than application behavior. We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation. We’ve delisted the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro from our Android Benchmark chart,” tweeted GeekBench.
GeekBench further said that it will be testing all OnePlus phones to check if any other device is also doing something similar. “We will also test the other OnePlus handsets in our performance lab to see if these handsets also manipulate performance in the same way. If they do, we will delist them from the Android Benchmark chart,” it added.

AnandTech in its report said that the OnePlus 9 Pro’s software was using an application detection mechanism and intentionally kept running popular apps like Google Chrome, FireFox, Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and “pretty much everything that has any level of popularity in the Play Store” in processor’s slower cores.
“In testing, I had encountered something which really perplexed me, and caught my attention; seemingly inexplicable slow browser benchmark figures which were not in line with any other Snapdragon 888 device in the market, getting only a fraction of the scores and performance of other devices,” explained the report by AnandTech.
So, why is OnePlus doing? “The only sensible rationale for such a decision is to improve a device’s power efficiency and battery life,” the report added.
App detection is used by companies to make smartphones appear more powerful on benchmarking platforms, however, “instead of increasing the benchmark performance, the company is reducing real-world application performance to below that of the theoretical hardware capabilities,” it said.