Huawei and Oppo devices caught cheating in benchmarks, 3DMark promptly delists them

Dishonest marketing isn't new, but smartphone OEMs are becoming notorious for pushing things a bit too far. 3DMark has informed press outlets that it recently removed both the Oppo Find X and Oppo F7 smartphones from its database rankings due to "artificially high and misleading benchmarks scores". The Find X was previously listed as the fourth best smartphone in the Sling Shot Extreme benchmark, but it is now unranked.

To catch the fake scores, 3DMark runs suspect smartphones through public and private versions of the same benchmark. If the final scores in the public benchmark are significantly higher than in the private benchmark, then the smartphone is likely equipped with specialized software made to recognize specific benchmarks which would be against 3DMark's guidelines. In Oppo's case, the final score was 41 percent higher in the public benchmark when compared to the private benchmark even though both benchmarks are identical.

3DMark has informed Oppo of the misleading numbers and Oppo admitted to cheating the system. Nonetheless, the Chinese OEM is promising to "strive to distinguish between the requirements of undetected apps or the subjective needs of users".

The news comes one month after 3DMark caught Huawei falsifying benchmark scores on some of its top smartphones. The Huawei P20 Pro, P20, Nova 3, and Honor Play were all delisted for the same reasons.

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