Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 also caught throttling games, leading to Geekbench delisting
Two weeks ago, Samsung wascaught throttling performancefor some apps and games on its phones, including the brand-new Galaxy S22 series, and going back as far as the Galaxy S10. As a result of that action, the phones weredelisted from the library of devices on Geekbench, seemingly permanently according to the company’s current policies. Amid the threat of a class-action suit, Samsung hasstarted rolling out an updatethat changes this behavior, but Android Police has confirmed that the company’s latestGalaxy Tab S8generation of tablets is also affected.
Testing recent generations of Samsung’s tablets, we found that the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and S8+ both throttled performance when a version of the Geekbench app with the Genshin Impact package name was running (in essence, convincing the system that it was playing a game and not the benchmarking application), affecting the benchmark’s resulting score. Single-threaded CPU performance fell 18-24% and multi-core performance fell 6-11%.
Genshin package scores
Standard Geekbench scores
Tab S8 Ultra
Table of testing across Samsung Tab devices available
Although prior testing observed throttling on earlier generations of Samsung phones, we didn’t see any similar behavior on prior generation tablets, with the Tab S7 series and a Tab S5e seemingly unaffected in our testing. Any differences on those devices within the expected margin of error.
Some have claimed that Samsung was throttling performance for over 10,000 apps due to a list that claimed to be associated with the Game Optimization Service or GOS, but that’s not quite correct. Both our own digging into the actual code governing this throttling behavior and Samsung’s statements have confirmed that not all apps are affected, and the degree to which it throttles performance can and will vary. Samsung also previously claimed, “GOS does not manage the performance of non-gaming apps.”
Our own examination of the logic indicates that GOS is a very sophisticated system that takes into account multiple variables when throttling performance to varying degrees, including temperature, expected FPS, power consumption, temperature, and more. This may also help to explain why the tablets tested did not throttle as hard as the Galaxy S22 series phones — more space inside likely means better heat dissipation, and the system can take details like these into account.
Samsung did not immediately respond to questions regarding the observed throttling behavior on the Tab S8 series.
Although the Galaxy Tab S8 series has not yet been added to Geekbench’s list of devices and doesn’t yet appear in search, the company tells us that it plans to delist the device, much as it did with the affected Galaxy S phones. Geekbench’s policy, as previously communicated to Android Police during the original throttling saga, indicates the tablets won’t return even if the behavior is addressed in a future update — though that policy is potentially subject to change.
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