OnePlus, Meizu Reportedly Caught Cheating on Benchmark Scores

In a new development, OnePlus and Meizu have reportedly both been found to be artificially boosting their benchmark scores to fool critics and users. The OnePlus 3T and Meizu Pro 6 Plus were found to have been tweaked to show slightly higher scores than they deserve. While OnePlus has acknowledged the issue and promised a fix, Meizu has refrained from commenting on the issue so far.

In the past, many OEMs including Samsung were reported to have cheated to elevate their benchmark scores. These unethical measures were lambasted, and Samsung rolled back the fraudulent practice after a major backlash.

XDA Developers claims to have uncovered that OnePlus was using cheats to achieve a higher score on benchmarks. Furthermore, the increase in score was minimal, and the need to indulge in fraudulent practices for such a little perquisite was questionable.

"OnePlus was making 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," the report said.

When OnePlus was contacted, it swiftly promised to fix it in a future OxygenOS update. '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," the company's spokesperson told XDA.

As for Meizu, XDA Developers found that Meizu Pro 6 Plus switched to 'Performance Mode' from its normal 'Standard Mode' whenever it sensed benchmark apps. It had further tweaked Performance Mode that be even more aggressive than usual when entering a benchmark app. The company has not reacted to XDA Developers' criticism.

This also gives a fair warning to all buyers to not take benchmark scores as the final word on a smartphone's performance. The only certain way to know how a device will perform is by using it for a while.