Guides

What the numbers mean, and what they cannot tell you. Written because the results screen needs these explanations anyway.

• What does the score actually mean?A DeadTier score is 0–100 against one fixed yardstick, and a CPU score is a raw count. Here is what each number is, why a phone is expected to sit low, and what the tier can and cannot tell you.
• Why is my new phone slower than my old one?A newer phone can genuinely feel worse than the one it replaced. The usual causes are background apps, a full disc, thermal state and an ageing battery — and most of them are visible in a benchmark if you know what to look at.
• What makes a device throttle?Throttling is a device deliberately slowing itself down — for heat, for power, or for the battery. Here is what causes it, how it looks in a measurement, and why a benchmark partly causes the thing it reports.
• Is my phone throttling?Throttling leaves a signature: speed that drops across a run rather than staying flat. Here is what the Speed Under Load chart shows, what the throttling flag actually means, which other numbers move with it, and what a browser cannot tell you.
• What is 1% low FPS?An average frame rate can look healthy while a device stutters. The 1% low is the mean of the slowest frames — the number that matches how a device feels. How it is measured, what a gap from the average means, and why consistency is shown but not scored.
• Why does the same device score differently?Run the test twice on one device and the numbers move. Some of that is measured and shown; some is not solved. What was found running the same machine four times in a row, what the pass spread does and does not tell you, and how to compare runs honestly.
• How to test a phone in a shopNothing to install, about a minute, on a demo unit you do not own. What to run, which two numbers to read, how to compare it against the phone in your pocket, and why a demo unit is a worst case rather than a verdict.
• What GPU does my phone have?Your phone tells the browser which graphics chip it has, so it can be read without installing anything. What the name means, which class it falls in, why the answer is sometimes hidden, and why no browser can honestly benchmark a GPU.