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This version of Geekbench 4 is designed to avoid any benchmark detection, in order to allow Geekbench to run as a normal application on phones that are cheating (going beyond the package renaming that fools most attempts at benchmark cheating). Thanks to the substantial changes between Geekbench 3 and 4, the “Mini Golf” version had to be rebuilt from the ground up specifically for this testing. As by this point we had fairly clear evidence that OnePlus was engaging in benchmark cheating, Primate Labs built a “Bob’s Mini Golf Putt” version of Geekbench 4 for us.
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Most notably, the OnePlus 3T was looking for Geekbench, AnTuTu, Androbench, Quadrant, Vellamo, and GFXBench. The initial testing included a ROM dump which found that the OnePlus 3T was directly looking for quite a few apps by name. We brought a OnePlus 3T to Primate Labs’ office in Toronto for some initial analysis. We reached out to the team at Primate Labs (the creators of Geekbench), who were instrumental in exposing the first wave of benchmark cheating, and partnered with them for further testing. Later, when we began comparing throttling and thermals across devices, the OnePlus 2 became a textbook example of what OEMs should avoid. You can find heavy throttling in our OnePlus 2 review, where we found the device could shed off up to 50% of its Geekbench 3 multi core score. One of our main concerns was that OnePlus was possibly setting looser thermal restrictions in this mode in order avoid the problems they had with the OnePlus One, OnePlus X, and OnePlus 2, where the phones were handling the additional cores coming online for the multi-core section of Geekbench poorly, and occasionally throttling down substantially as a result (to the point where the OnePlus X sometimes scored lower in the multi core section than in the single core section). Our hypothesis was that OnePlus was targeting these benchmarks by name, and was entering an alternate CPU scaling mode to pump up their benchmark scores. Upon first seeing this we were worried that OnePlus’ CPU scaling was simply set a bit strangely, however upon further testing we came to the conclusion that OnePlus must be targeting specific applications. This is quite strange, as normally both sets of cores drop down to 0.31 GHz on the OnePlus 3T when there is no load. When entering certain benchmarking apps, the OnePlus 3T’s cores would stay above 0.98 GHz for the little cores and 1.29 GHz for the big cores, even when the CPU load dropped to 0%. As a general rule of thumb, we avoid testing benchmarks with performance monitoring tools open whenever possible due to the additional performance overhead that they bring (particularly in non-Snapdragon devices where the are no official desktop tools), however in this incident they helped us notice some strange behavior that we likely would have missed otherwise. Our editor-in-chief, Mario Serrafero, was using Qualcomm Trepn and the Snapdragon Performance Visualizer to monitor how Qualcomm “boosts” the CPU clock speed when opening apps, and noticed that certain apps on the OnePlus 3T were not falling back down to their normal idling speeds after opening. While investigating how Qualcomm achieves faster app opening speeds on the then-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, we noticed something strange on the OnePlus 3T that we could not reproduce on the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 or the Google Pixel XL, among other Snapdragon 821 devices. These development efforts ran the whole gamut, from setting clock speed floors, to forcing the clock speeds to their maximum settings, to even creating special higher power states and special clock speeds that were only available when benchmarking, with these efforts often resulting in just a couple percentage point increases in benchmark. They were all investing time and money into attempts to eke a little bit extra performance out of their phones in benchmarks, in ways that wouldn’t have any positive effect on everyday usage, in an attempt to fool users into thinking that their phones were faster than they actually were. At the time, the investigation found that almost every manufacturer except for Google/Motorola were engaging in benchmark cheating.
BENCHMARKS FROM GEEKBENCH CHEATING SERIES
OEMs of all sizes (including Samsung, HTC, Sony, and LG) took part in this arms race of attempting to fool users without getting caught, but thankfully they eventually stopped their benchmark cheating after some frank discussions with industry experts and journalists.īack in 2013, it was discovered that the Samsung was artificially boosting its GPU clock speeds in certain applications, sparking a series of investigations into benchmark cheating across the whole range of manufacturers. A few years ago there was a considerable uproar, when numerous major manufacturers were caught cheating on benchmarks.