Xiaomi found 'throttling' with smartphone performance

Earlier this year, Samsung was found to be throttling performance on its latest Samsung Galaxy S22 flagships. Now, Xiaomi is also witnessed to be doing the same with its latest Xiaomi 12 series smartphones. According to a finding by Android Police, Xiaomi smartphones showed remarkable performance among the "spoofed" versions of the benchmarking app. Geekbench. The Android Police report said that the Xiaomi 12 Pro and Xiaomi 12X get a better performance profile in apps it recognises as games or benchmarks.

According to Geekbench, such behaviour will see affected phones removed from their benchmark charts later this week. Android Police says Xiaomi is "giving apps it recognises as games or benchmarks a better performance profile and throttling performance for other apps."

Test results varied for different models, but in Xiaomi 12 series, Xiaomi 12 Pro powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was found to be more affected by the throttling issue compared to Xiaomi 12X powered by Qualcomm 888. Versions of the Geekbench app that the system recognises as Geekbench or Genshin Impact scored up to 50 percent better single-core performance on the Xiaomi 12 Pro compared to versions of the app that the system thought was Netflix or Google Chrome. Even the Xiaomi 12X was affected to some extent, according to the Android Police report.

The performance also varied when the phone correctly identified the app as Geekbench. The Play Store version of the app scored higher than a slightly different corporate version of the app. The Xiaomi 12X also saw a more significant gap between gaming and benchmark performance, which didn't happen on the Xiaomi 12 Pro.

The report says that Xiaomi is speeding up the performance of its smartphones simply by loading different profiles based on app identification details such as package names, with games and benchmarking apps getting the most performance. In contrast, other less demanding applications get a limited performance profile.