The official statement, which was released to XDA, says that the reason behind the alleged performance throttling was due to OnePlus’ R&D team working on the OnePlus 9 Pro’s performance optimisation with popular apps, which includes Chrome. And that the team was trying to match the app’s processor requirements with an appropriate amount of power, therefore leading to a “smooth experience while reducing power consumption”.
— Geekbench (@geekbench) July 6, 2021 While the statement sounds par for the course, XDA does point out that the wording implies that OnePlus had only implemented this performance behaviour after the phone’s launch. By the account of another mobile tech site, PhoneArena, the performance throttling issues seems to have been present even before the phone’s official launch. Specifically, during the review period, when different tech media entities were given the phone for testing. For now, the OnePlus 9 Pro remains delisted from Geekbench’s Android Benchmark chart. In addition, the benchmark service also said that it will be testing other OnePlus handsets to ascertain if they had been tweaked in a similar fashion and if they do, they too would be removed from the charts. (Source: XDA, AnandTech, GeekBench via Twitter)
