Huawei caught cheating performance test for its P20 phones

Moneycontrol News

Huawei smartphones have been delisted from the 'best smartphone' category of phone performance benchmark app 3DMark after it was discovered that the company was cheating on its smartphone performance tests. As reported by TechCrunch, the delisted smartphones were Huawei’s P20, P20 Pro, Nova 3 and Honor Play.

Every smartphone has to undergo a performance benchmark test through 3DMark. The company behind the app, UL Benchmarks, stated:  "After testing the devices in our lab and confirming that they breach our rules, we have decided to delist the affected models and remove them from our performance rankings."

Rules for the Chinese-based smartphone manufacturers seem to be different as the smartphones are allowed to adjust its performance based on the workload. This leads to either peaks or dips in its performance on different apps. The smartphones, however, are not allowed hard-code peaks in its performance especially for the benchmark app test.

Huawei has stated that the performance peak observed during the run of 3DMark was intuitive and determined by Artificial Intelligence.

The smartphones displayed lower performances when an unlabeled version of the benchmark test was run. It was further observed that the smartphones were unable to recognise the unlabeled versions. In 2013, South-Korea based Samsung was caught cheating the rules.

The benchmark performance tests provide little input regarding the overall performance of the smartphone. They do, however, provide information about the smartphone’s performance during heavy stress.

AnandTech was the first to discover the smartphone company boosting its performance to ace the 3DMark performance test.