oneplus benchmarks deleted geekbench over 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. 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. 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. 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). 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%.

Oneplus benchmarks deleted geekbench over cheating