Mess with benchmarks, and your phones get benched
There’s nothing worse than picking up a new flagship Android device, only to find out software restrictions hold it back from peak performance. Samsung’s Galaxy S22 series might be running on some seriously powerful hardware, but as we reported yesterday, the company throttles its devices when playing popular gaming titles, among other apps. Now, in response to its less-than-honest performance, Geekbench is taking direct action against Samsung.
Geekbench told us it plans to delist the entire Galaxy S22 series from the Geekbench Browser effective today, along with all S21, S20, and S10 devices. Galaxy Note and A-series devices will remain unchanged, as they do not appear to be impacted in testing. This move comes after reports that One UI 4’s GOS software throttles thousands of apps to maintain performance and improve battery life. In our independent testing, we confirmed a significant reduction in performance when spoofing Genshin Impact.
Geekbench provided us with the following statement:
Earlier this week, we were made aware of Samsung’s Game Optimizing Service (GOS) and how it throttles the performance of games and applications. GOS decides to throttle (or not to throttle) applications using application identifiers and not application behavior. We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation as major benchmark applications, including Geekbench, are not throttled by this service.
Samsung has promised to release a future update that will add the ability to control gaming performance directly. However, Geekbench’s current policy is to keep manipulated devices delisted permanently, even following a patch that fixes the issue, so none of the phones removed today will be relisted on the site. Samsung did not provide a timeframe for when this update might make its way out to users.
It’s not the first time Geekbench has pulled devices from its benchmark chart. Last year, in response to OnePlus throttling apps on the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro, the service delisted both devices from its browser.
Read Next
About The Author
