A few days ago, Geekbench has put the Galaxy S22/S21 suspected of “manipulating benchmarks” due to the limitation of the performance of tens of thousands of applications in the “Game Optimization Service” (GOS), but the synchronization did not occur during the benchmark test.
The S20/S10 fourth-generation smartphones were removed from the database. Previously, the OnePlus 9 series smartphone was also processed by Geekbench for a similar situation, but Samsung still seems to want to defend the “GOS” service a little more – although not everyone can hear it.
It is reported that Game Optimization Service (GOS) is a system scheduling optimization program on recent generations of Galaxy S flagship smartphones, which aims to balance software performance/device heating control.
Ideally, it shouldn’t affect the performance experience too much. But some Galaxy S22 users have found that GOS also affects the performance of non-resource-intensive applications.
Earlier reports pointed out that GOS may slow down the speed of the previous app, but benchmarking software such as Geekbench was exempted from this service, making it into the embarrassing situation of “running score cheating”.
Samsung officially explained the GOS, waiting for the next firmware update pic.twitter.com/UaMt4Khbz7
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) March 8, 2022
Samsung acknowledged the limitation and promised to fix the issue with subsequent updates, while the company shared a “Frequently Asked Questions” document.
According to the FAQ list shared by well-known whistleblower @UniverseIce on Twitter, Samsung is trying to explain how the GOS service works – claiming that GOS should only control the game’s heat/performance in a balanced manner, without affecting regular applications on the Galaxy S22. program.
However, this statement contradicts itself with a list of as many as tens of thousands of applications – “The game optimization service monitors the state of the phone and helps maintain optimal performance in case the game runs excessively (temperature/power consumption) Stuttering and performance degradation due to throttling”.
The company continues to argue that GOS affects other non-gaming apps on smartphones such as the Galaxy S22 — the list of tens of thousands of apps mentioned in the GOS APK is just to quickly determine whether a newly installed app is a game, not related to GOS strategy.
However, in the eyes of foreign media such as BGR, this statement is still unconvincing, because the list does not only include game names. There’s also a question about how the list helps the phone confirm whether an app is a game, after all, Google’s official app store has millions of apps.
Finally, Samsung explains why GOS doesn’t slow down the benchmarking application – “the benchmarking tool is not a gaming application and therefore is not part of the GOS policy.”
Only in the case of gaming applications would GOS policies properly intervene in performance throttling focused on power consumption/thermal control, considering constant usage scenarios with high CPU/GPU usage.
In fact, Samsung has been using the tool since 2016. But with the release of the OneUI 4.0 software, users were surprised to find that they couldn’t bypass the GOS throttling.
As for the “fix,” Samsung explained — once users are able to manually disable GOS, game performance is expected to see a 10 fps boost. Even so, the system will continue to monitor the temperature of the device to ensure safe use.