Samsung had a bit of a pickle when it found out that the Galaxy S22 phones would be banned from GeekBench. The reason was that they had a way of identifying benchmarking apps and changing the device behavior accordingly, which is basically cheating. Now the same happens to the Galaxy Tab S8 devices.
Samsung had trouble with the fact that it was artificially throttling app performance on some of its devices via something called the Game Optimization Service (GOS). It affected the last generation of Galaxy S devices and also the Tab S8 apparently, which has been delisted from the Geekbench database. A report from Android Police shows that the Galaxy Tab S8+ and Tab S8 Ultra reach much lower scores in a modified version of GeekBench with the app renamed to Genshin Impact (a popular mobile game).
This trick makes a tablet think it’s running a game and not a benchmarking app. It also resulted in lower single core and multi core CPU scores. This means that when a set of app names associated to benchmarks is detected, they’ll be run with more power than other apps.
Tab S8+ had the largest discrepancy, as it reached 1221 and 3372 points in the standard GeekBench version and 920 and 3000 points in the modified version. Galaxy Tab S7 and Tab S7 FE, or the Tab S5e didn’t have the same problem. Samsung already started issuing a software update for the S22 series that disables the limitations of the GOS. No word on the update coming to the Tab S8 series just yet.
