Xiaomi’s performance is limited in games according to Benchmark

After Samsung recently faced massive criticism for limiting the performance of games and other apps, such as benchmarks, through a form of whitelisting, competitor Xiaomi is now in the spotlight for similar procedures. As John Poole, head and lead developer of Primate Labs announced via Twitter, he found in his own tests that Xiaomi also manipulates benchmarks. Primate Labs is behind the cross-platform benchmarking tool Geekbench, which can be used to determine the performance of Android smartphones and all types of PCs and Apple devices.

According to Poole, Xiaomi’s software also apparently recognizes when the user launches a benchmark and then boosts the CPU performance of their respective device to achieve better test results. Conversely, the performance of several games is throttled as Xiaomi apparently identifies these programs by their name and reduces performance. The creator of Geekbench found that the test results of its benchmark tool on a Xiaomi Mi are 11 to 30 percent lower if the program is named after a well-known game and thus “disguised”. According to Poole, among other things, he experimented with cheating the operating system into believing that Geekbench was actually the game Genshin Impact of Fortnite.

Benchmark results are not comparable to daily performance

Of course, Xiaomi also tries to limit the performance of certain smartphones when using games and other apps. On the other hand, it would also be conceivable that Xiaomi Geekbench simply delivers more performance in order to deliver better benchmark results. However, both scenarios mean that the results of the benchmark tools cannot be compared with the performance available to the user in everyday life. It is unclear what goal is being pursued.

Samsung had admitted that they wanted to use the so-called Game Optimizing Service (GOS) to ensure that the smartphone would not overheat if games were used for a long time. In order to give users the choice in the future when it comes to performance throttling in games, Samsung recently released an update for the top smartphones of recent years, where the GOS can be turned off if desired and thus more performance in games.