Samsung has been embroiled in controversy over its Game Optimization Service, which quietly throttles the performance of around 10,000 applications. The discovery led to Geekbench pulling all benchmark results for all recent flagship Galaxy smartphones, and Samsung promising to release an update with a toggle for the functionality. Xiaomi has also used various performance tweaks over the years, and according to Geekbench, the company is now doing the same per-app throttling as Samsung.

John Poole, founder of Primate Labs (the developers of Geekbench), reported on Sunday that Xiaomi is using the same sort of per-app performance tweaks as Samsung's Game Optimization Service. Poole tested the optimization service on a Xiaomi Mi 11 with a custom build of Geekbench, which replaced the usual app identifier with the identifier from Fortnite. The result was a 30% speed reduction for single-core performance and 15% lower multi-core performance than the normal Geekbench app. In other words, Xiaomi's software either boosts performance when Geekbench is detected, or intentionally slows down Fortnite (or both).

Android Police conducted its own testing with the Xiaomi 12 Pro and Xiaomi 12X, which showed Geekbench disguised as Netflix and Chrome performing worse than Geekbench disguised as the mobile game Genshin Impact. For example, Geekbench with a Chrome identifier received a single-core score of 737 and a multi-core score of 3071, while Geekbench disguised as Genshin Impact received a single-core score of 1119 and a multi-core score of 3468.

It's not clear if the throttling is purely based on the package name of a given application or game, or if the phone observes performance over time and attempts to adjust throttling through other methods. Geekbench confirmed to Android Police that it will begin delisting Xiaomi phones from its Android Benchmark chart starting "later this week."

Source: Android Police