OnePlus 3T benchmark cheating: ‘Better user experience’ reason cited by smartphone maker

If latest reports are to be believed, the heavily-discussed OnePlus 3T smartphone has been caught cheating on benchmarks. The company is now reportedly into damage control mode and is looking to fix things up quickly. XDA recently found out that OnePlus 3T enhances processor clock speeds artificially while running certain benchmark apps.

This makes the CPU cores run at a higher rate even when it does not have any workload. The OnePlus interface, HydrogenOS, has reportedly done this for a while.

However, it showed up on OxygenOS, the software for other parts of the world, in community builds, ahead of the Android 7.0 Nougat upgrade, writes Engadget. In an official statement by OnePlus, the company stated that it will stop ramping up processors for benchmarks in the scheduled OxygenOS releases for both OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. Even though the company has tried defending saying it did so to provide a better user-experience while using demanding apps, there is no reason for hiking speeds on benchmarks.

“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 ... and noticed that certain apps on the OnePlus 3T were not falling back down to their normal idling speeds after opening,” explains XDA.

Apart from the OnePlus 3T handset, XDA also caught the Meizu Pro 6 Plus cheating on benchmarks. This only proves that even though it is alright to consider benchmark scores, it’s the real-world circumstances that actually test smartphones.

“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,” OnePlus stated in damage-control mode.

Meanwhile, OnePlus 3T’s impressive has also been compared with Apple iPhone 7. OnePlus 3T runs on Android Marshmallow and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processsor and Adreno 530 GPU. It comes with a 16MP primary camera with f/2.0, phase detection autofocus, OIS and LED flash. The secondary camera is also of 16MP. Stay tuned on IBT AU for more updates on the OnePlus 3T handset.