The founder MediaTek offers an optimized mode which boosts the performance of smartphones when the system detects that it is facing a benchmark software. A practice regularly pinned in the press.
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There are women from Arles in the world of mobility, and cheating linked to benchmarks is one of them. Regularly, new smartphones attract the attention of SoC specialists with performances that seem overestimated compared to the initial configuration of the product. In a survey published by our colleagues fromAnandtech, we discover today that many MediaTek chips offer a “sport mode” which discreetly increases the performance displayed during benchmarks.
30% overall performance gains
It was by testing the Reno3 Pro from the Chinese manufacturer Oppo that doubts arose among our colleagues. The European version of the smartphone, equipped with a SoC Helio P95, displayed much better performance than the Chinese Reno3, equipped with a SoC Dimensity 1000L – also signed MediaTek – yet supposed to be more efficient.
Suspecting fraud on PCMark, a famous mobile benchmark, the media demanded an anonymous version of the software, preventing the smartphone from recognizing it. AnandTech saw a 30% difference in the overall performance of the Helio P95 and a difference of up to 75% in some tests. The cause lies in a file named power_whitelist_cfg.xml in / vendor / etc activating a “sport mode” when a benchmark app is spotted by the mobile. This mode is activated in particular on PCMark, AnTuTu, GFX and 3DBench, among the most used by testers.
Many affected mobiles
If the tests conducted by AnandTech relate to Oppo mobiles, the Chinese manufacturer is not the only one to provide products that “cheat” on benchmarks. The offending file was found on models from Vivo, Xiaomi, Realme, iVoomi and Sony. Moreover, the technique could be used for a while since the Sony XA1 is concerned, and already dates from 2016. We can then assume that dozens of smartphones benefited from the same performance gain during the tests.
MediaTek defended itself softly in a statement on its blog. The company believes that benchmarks accurately represent the capabilities of chipsets. “We find it interesting that AnandTech questioned benchmarking optimizations on devices powered by MediaTek SoCs, while these are widely practiced in the industry, details the press release. If they were to look at other devices, they would see, as we did, that our main competitor has chipsets that work in exactly the same way. ”
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