After Samsung’s recent debacle with app throttling, Xiaomi now may be in hot water with the same issue. Geekbench co-founder John Poole alleges that the Xiaomi Mi 11 throttles the performance of some gaming apps, but not benchmarks.
To test this, Poole disguised the Geekbench app by renaming it Fortnite. The results were surprising, to say the least when it received 30% lower single-core scores and almost 15% lower multi-core scores, which are way beyond any margin of error.
To further prove the discrepancy, the developer renamed the build again to Genshin Impact, which achieved similar lowered scores. This would suggest that Xiaomi is throttling certain power-hungry apps for some reason, though the fact that benchmark apps are exempted isn’t a good look for the company’s practice, as it would mean that the scores don’t reflect real-life performance.
Looks like Xiaomi is also making performance decisions based on application identifiers.
— John Poole (@jfpoole) March 27, 2022
Just today, Android Police published a report that also found score differences with the company’s latest flagship, the Xiaomi 12 Pro, when running spoof benchmark tests. The site claims that Geekbench and a Genshin Impact benchmark spoof got up to 50% higher performance than when the app is disguised as Netflix or Google Chrome.
Sadly, this isn’t even the first time that Xiaomi has faced allegations of throttling as Anandtech previously called out the company for something similar last year with the Xiaomi 11T Pro. Similarly, OnePlus has also been found to cheat on benchmark apps quite a few times, with Geekbench removing the 9 Pro from charts last year. As for Samsung, the tech giant recently rolled out an update to fix the issue after being caught.
(Source: John Poole/Twitter)
