After Galaxy S22, Geekbench Delists Galaxy Tab S8 For Throttling Scheme

The performance throttling saga for Samsung's flagship hardware isn't over yet. After getting its Galaxy S series flagships — starting with Galaxy S22 and dating all the way back to Galaxy S10 — delisted from a popular benchmarking platform, the ax has now fallen on the Galaxy Tab S8 series of flagship tablets. The folks over at Android Police ran a few tests on the Galaxy Tab S8+ and its Ultra variant and found that both devices are also engaged in performance throttling.

In order to test it, the Geekbench benchmarking app's package name was changed to "Genshin Impact," a resource-intensive game that is often used to assess a chip's raw firepower and the efficiency of a device's thermal hardware. When the benchmarking app's name was changed, the tablets' single-core benchmarking tally fell by up to 28 percent, while the multi-core scores went down by approximately 10 percent. The performance throttling happens based simply on the name identifier of an app, while the entire functionality remains identical.

In simple words, the Galaxy Tab S8+ and Tab S8 Ultra's performance took a hit because they limited the system resources by identifying the name of a game. In response to the findings, Geekbench has delisted the Galaxy Tab S8 from its benchmarking database. There is no mention of the ban being permanent, especially in the wake of Samsung potentially solving the inherent problem in the days to come.

After all, Samsung has taken cognizance of the backlash and has already rolled out an update to address the performance throttling issue on its Galaxy S22 series phones. The aforementioned update adds a performance modifier to the game booster dashboard that lets users bypass the throttling initiated by the pre-installed GOS app. The GOS app reportedly tweaks the system resource allocation based on name identifier, instead of an app's behavior. Initial reports claimed that there's a blacklist of about 10,000 apps hit with the performance throttling, and it includes not just games, but also the likes of Instagram.

However, further investigation revealed otherwise, and Samsung has also claimed that performance throttling is limited to games. Samsung is yet to issue a statement about the Galaxy Tab S8 series' delisting from Geekbench, and it is unclear if the behavior will be addressed via a software update similar to the one pushed out to the Galaxy S22 series phones. Interestingly, the older Galaxy Tab S7 series appear to be immune to the performance throttling, which suggests that the GOS system's behavior was updated this year for tablets. 

On the other hand, the app's throttling shenanigans go all the way back to the Galaxy S10 series that was introduced in 2019. Irrespective of the corrective steps that are taken, this is a huge mess for Samsung and definitely not a desirable situation for folks who forked out north of $800 on Samsung's latest tablets and phones. It remains to be seen whether the whole situation spirals into a class-action lawsuit, something Apple is all too familiar with.