Do NOT Trust OnePlus 5 Benchmarks in Reviews How our Review Unit is Grossly Cheating at Benchmarks
So how does it work, and whats the difference? Last time around, OnePlus introduced changes to the behavior of their ROM whenever it detected a benchmark application was opened. Such application names were explicitly listed by their package IDs within the ROM in a manifest that specified the targets. Then, the ROM would alter the frequency in relation to an adjusted CPU load our tools showed CPU load would drop to 0% regardless of obvious activity within the application, and the CPU would see a near-minimum frequency of 1.29GHz in the big cores and 0.98GHz in the little cores. This minimum frequency reduced the effective frequency range, which in turn reduced the number of step frequencies; in benchmarks, this resulted in slightly lower variance and, as we showed, higher sustained performance as the higher minimum frequency could not be overridden by thermal throttling. In short, cheating behavior was clear and demonstrable by both looking at score variance, and by monitoring CPU frequencies throughout the benchmark, which showed a frequency floor that for the most part allowed the device to consistently score closer to its full potential.
The OnePlus 5, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast
it resorts to the kind of obvious, calculated cheating mechanisms we saw in flagships in the early days of Android, an approach that is clearly intended to maximize scores in the most misleading fashion. While there are no governor switches when a user enters a benchmark (at least, we cant seem to see thats the case), the minimum frequency of the little cluster jumps to the maximum frequency as seen under performance governors. All little cores are affected and kept at 1.9GHz, and it is through this cheat that OnePlus achieves some of the highest GeekBench 4 scores of a Snapdragon 835 to date and likely the highest attainable given its no-compromise configuration with its specific configuration. Scores certainly higher than those obtained by similar devices and Qualcomms own MSM8998 test device which we were lucky enough to benchmark. Below is a list of benchmark applications affected:
AnTuTu (com.antutu.benchmark.full)
Androbench (com.andromeda.androbench2)
Geekbench 4 (com.primatelabs.geekbench)
GFXBench (com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark27)
Quadrant (com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.standard)
Nenamark 2 (se.nena.nenamark2)
Vellamo (com.quicinc.vellamo)
