The OnePlus 5 isn’t cheating on benchmarks, the company’s co-founder and head of global business Carl Pei said earlier this week, shortly after initial reports that the newly unveiled Android flagship is artificially maintaining high clock speeds of its processor whenever it detects that it’s running one of the most popular mobile benchmarking apps on the market. Pei took to Reddit to defend his company’s actions by stating that the vanilla software powering the OnePlus 5 only increases the performance of the Snapdragon 835 in the same manner that it does when the phone is running games or other resource-intensive apps, with its scores consequently being indicative of how well can the device perform under heavy load. The same behavior can allegedly be observed when the OnePlus 5 is launching apps because the Chinese original equipment manufacturer (OEM) wanted to make sure that its handset can switch between different tasks as quickly as possible, the firm’s co-founder claimed.
Pei explicitly asserted that the OnePlus 5 isn’t lowering its resolution or overclocking Qualcomm’s piece of 64-bit silicon when it detects benchmarks but is simply performing to its maximum potential, adding how OnePlus believes that’s what consumers who run benchmarks want to see. The OEM’s co-founder also dismissed rumors that this behavior is only present in the units sent to reviewers, noting how every model of the OnePlus 5 is running the same code and anything else would be misleading. Pei finally concluded that benchmarks “aren’t a useful proxy for real life [sic] performance” and urged the company’s following to tinker with the OnePlus 5 themselves to see how the device acts in everyday use.
Not all consumers were convinced by the aforementioned arguments, with some pointing out how maximized performance would quickly cause the device’s system-on-chip (SoC) to overheat and make it uncomfortable to use in games, while others stated that what OnePlus is doing can still easily be categorized as cheating seeing how most other OEMs aren’t looking to alter the performance of their products in benchmarks. The controversy is unlikely to affect the commercial performance of the OnePlus 5 that already became the fastest-selling smartphone ever created by the BBK Electronics-owned company and may become a massive hit among consumers over the summer.