Geekbench will ban Xiaomi's latest smartphones for manipulating the benchmarks

The Xiaomi 12 Pro and 12X will soon disappear from Geekbench benchmarks. According to the platform, the Chinese firm manipulates the performance of its smartphones in order to improve its scores.

According to our colleagues from Android Police, Geekbench, the famous benchmarking platform, is about to banish two recent smartphones designed by Xiaomi: the Xiaomi 12 Pro and the Xiaomi 12X. Looking at the benchmark results of both smartphones, the media found that the SoC offered better performance when a benchmarking or gaming application was open.

Conversely, the other applications get restrictions from the Chinese manufacturer. According to the media, Xiaomi has developed several performance profiles, which are activated depending on the applications launched. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which powers the 12 Pro, is significantly less powerful when a gaming application or benchmarking is not open.

When an application like Chrome or Netflix is ​​actively in use by the smartphone, the recorded performance drops by 50%. The results are also different on the Xiaomi 12X, which is content with a Snapdragon 888. The performance gap is less marked, however.

Geekbench will ban Xiaomi's latest smartphones for manipulating the benchmarks

Alerted by the media, Geekbench has pledged to exclude the two smartphones from its database by the end of the week. “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.

These are obviously not the only Xiaomi smartphones to manipulate benchmarks. According to the findings of the founder and president of Geekbench, John Poole, the Xiaomi 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, he publishes two smartphone benchmarks. “Here are the results from a Xiaomi Mi 11 running Geekbench and running Geekbench disguised as Fortnite. Single-core scores are 30% lower and multi-core scores are 15% lower in the Fortnite version,” the developer points out. In this case, Xiaomi only unleashes chipset performance when a benchmarking app is open.

Note that Samsung has also been the subject of manipulation in recent weeks. Mirroring Xiaomi, the South Korean giant has integrated a software solution capable of restraining or unbridling performance depending on the applications open on its smartphones. The brand then promised the deployment of a fix. We expect that Xiaomi will also do the same.