Xiaomi releases the “optimization” excuse right off their butts
After alleged throttling, Geekbench has decided to ban the Xiaomi 12 Pro and 12X (but not the Xiaomi 12, apparently) on their websites. People don’t often trust benchmarks as a legitimate way to determine performance as they can be manipulated. Time and time it happens, and this is the most recent accusation of cheating.
Geekbench found out that the phone can determine whether it is being benchmarked or being played with different games and from that determiner alone, the phone can enhance the performance to make it appear it performs way more than it normally should.
“It’s disappointing to see another device maker mislead consumers by reducing app performance, but not benchmarking performance. We are investigating which Xiaomi phones have the problem and we will be removing the devices,” Geekbench said in a statement.
Of course, the Xiaomi 12x and 12 Pro aren’t the only suspects of Xiaomi’s alleged cheating. John Poole founder and president of Geekbench has also discovered that the Mi 11 is also affected. “It looks like Xiaomi is also making performance decisions based on identified apps,” says John Poole on his Twitter account.
To prove his point, Poole benchmarked two phones and has since published a response. In his test, he used Geekbench and “Fortnite” which is actually just Geekbench in disguise in order to fool the AI. In his tests, he found out that single-core scores are 30% lower than the alleged enhanced performance mode and 15% lower on the multi-score score. This was the result that came out of the “Fortnite” build. The phone used here is the Xiaomi Mi 11.
Xiaomi has responded it saying that it applies “temperature control strategies” to ensure optimal product experience at all times. In short, the phone optimizes the performance so it doesn’t heat up so much. This is, by the way, the same excuse used by other manufacturers for throttling their phones. Apple has previously released a different statement. They slow down their phones to prevent them from suddenly turning off and crashing. Highly noticeable on older phones that support the latest version of iOS.
In addition to that statement, Xiaomi said that users can choose between three performance modes that can be configured through its gaming manager app. This can range from power saver all the way to performance. It seems like the phone automatically selects “performance” mode whenever it detects a benchmarking or gaming app, hence the alleged throttling or cheating.