Yet another chapter related to GOS, the Samsung Game Optimization Service, which has caused much discussion in the last few days after the discovery that, through this service, Samsung smartphones entered into voluntary throttling, limiting the performance of CPU and GPU, on paper, to save battery and avoid overheating. Further developments in the affair have led Geekbench to remove the last four generations of Samsung’s top range from its databases.
The GOS should have managed the performance of Samsung smartphones only during gaming sessions; however, the service was found to slow down smartphones in over 10,000 applications but did not intervene when benchmark utilities were launched.
Yesterday Samsung, consulted by The Verge, stated that a fix will soon be released that will leave the user the freedom to decide whether to enable or disable the GOS, not mentioning the speeches related to apps, not games, on which the service intervened.
Geekbench wanted to see clearly on Samsung smartphones
The Geekbench team, a well-known platform for the benchmark, wanted to dig deep into the functioning of the GOS, with the intention of understanding on the basis of which factors it discriminated against the apps, in order to intervene or not.
Digging deeper, Geekbench found that Samsung conveniently omitted the name of benchmark apps like 3DMark and Geekbench from the list of apps that GOS has access to; however, once these apps were renamed (and therefore no longer recognized as “exempt from treatment” by GOS), their results were affected.
The bottom line is, therefore, that it’s about manipulation of benchmark results, with tools that are overestimating the real performance of Samsung smartphones.
After extensive internal testing we have determined the following Samsung Galaxy handsets use GOS:
– Samsung Galaxy S22 (all models)
– Samsung Galaxy S21 (all models)
– Samsung Galaxy S20 (all models)
– Samsung Galaxy S10 (all models)— Geekbench (@geekbench) March 4, 2022
Geekbench found that all models of Samsung’s latest four series of top-of-the-line smartphones, Galaxy S10, Galaxy S20, Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S22, use GOS and banned all smartphones from their platform.
Such behavior is nothing new in the smartphone landscape. Last year OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro were removed from Geekbench for something similar (albeit to a much lesser extent).
This was just another chapter of Samsung’s GOS issue. We will continue to follow the story, especially to find out if Samsung will release further statements on the matter.