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![]() Oppo pushed a firmware update to a Reno3 Pro being used for testing, and the benchmark listings disappeared from their original locations in the whitelist. In a particularly damning turn of events, over the course of its investigation, AnandTech also appears to have uncovered attempts to hide the whitelisting, but not actually disable it. It requires significant resources and time too, which is why we must draw attention to these situations when they occur, so the wider community can verify the findings and potentially uncover other potential wrong-doers. Not only do you require the actual devices to test, but customized versions of the benchmark, not distributed through public app stores, are needed as well. While I don’t doubt there are other devices that behave similarly, uncovering issues like this is exceedingly difficult. In its blog post responding to the article defending its position and practices, MediaTek also states, “As we mentioned above, we follow accepted industry benchmarking standards and are confident that the capabilities of our chipsets are being accurately represented in benchmark tests.” And then MediaTek goes on to claim that one of its competitors is doing similar things with its chipsets, but doesn’t go so far as to name the competitor. The fact is, benchmark scores are extremely important for some audiences, and occasionally vendors will push the ethical envelope to paint their products in the best light possible in an attempt to win over those audiences. This reveals what the upper end of performance capabilities are on any given chipset.” The statement goes on to explain that device performance will vary based on regional market requirements, but there is no clear and justifiable explanation. Many companies design devices to run on the highest possible performance levels when benchmarking tests are running in order to show the full capabilities of the chipset. We work closely with global device makers when it comes to testing and benchmarking devices powered by our chipsets, but ultimately brands have the flexibility to configure their own devices as they see fit. MediaTek’s response said, “MediaTek follows accepted industry standards and is confident that benchmarking tests accurately represent the capabilities of our chipsets. There was still some thermal throttling going on, just to a smaller degree.MediaTek has since responded to the allegations. There the minimum frequencies of both the “big” and the “little” clusters were raised. The OnePlus 3 cheat was of a similar nature, though not identical. The official statement from OnePlus claims that this way it shows the performance potential of the 5. Note that the “secret build” listed in the chart has a different package name, so it isn’t detected. Not all benchmarks are affected, here’s the list of benchmarks that OnePlus checks for. It’s when GPU benchmarks are run that the heat becomes too much – the back of the phone was 50° C! Note that GPU clocks aren’t changed, but keeping the “little” cluster at max speed is enough to push thermals over the limit. Interestingly, in CPU-only benchmarks like Geekbench, the OnePlus 5 didn’t heat up that much faster. ![]() With cheating disabled, the “little” cluster spent only a quarter of the time at max frequency, so this also makes performance more consistent. That’s enough to push the multi-core benchmark results as high as they are, single-core results are unchanged (still, most people just look at the multi-core result). The “big” cluster is not affected by this. This isn’t an overclock, but it does disable thermal throttling. When a benchmark is detected, the 5 locks the “little” cluster of its Snapdragon 835 chipset at its highest possible clockspeed – 1.9GHz. Hit the source link for the full details, here’s the TL DR version. The OnePlus 5 was caught cheating on benchmarks in order to achieve its chart-topping performance.Ī detailed investigation by XDA-Developers discovered the mechanism of the cheat.
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