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UL (3DMark) delists OPPO Find X and F7 after benchmark cheating
- Benchmarking resource UL just delisted the OPPO Find X and OPPO F7 from its rankings.
- The demotion is in response to allegations OPPO cheated benchmarks by overclocking the phones in question during tests.
- Oppo’s alleged cheating was exposed weeks ago, but UL must have spent this time doing its own testing.
At the end of September, an exposé from TECH2 brought to light various smartphone manufacturers cheating benchmark scores with some of their high-profile phones. The research followed an admission from HUAWEI that it overclocked the HUAWEI P20 Pro to gain a favorable score.
The research performed by TECH2 suggested HUAWEI wasn’t the only one gaming the benchmarking system, but its sub-brand Honor and fellow Chinese OEM Oppo (and its sub-brand Realme) were doing the same.
Now, venerable benchmarking resource UL (which owns 3DMark, the benchmarking app) has delisted two popular OPPO devices from its benchmark leaderboard: the OPPO Find X and the OPPO F7. The delisting of the OPPO Find X is particularly noteworthy as it was previously ranked fourth on the list of Android smartphones.
The two devices in question are now at the bottom of the ranking list with no scores attached and “DELISTED” next to their names.
As explained in the TECH2 exposé, OPPO’s cheating strategy was fairly simple and similar to HUAWEI’s: when a user runs a recognized benchmarking app — in this case, 3DMark — the phone will, in response, ramp up all its processing power to artificially create a favorable score. Since the benchmarking procedure only lasts a short while, whether or not the phone could ever sustain that high of a workload doesn’t matter — unless, of course, you want benchmarking to be a fair and balanced system.
OPPO responded to the delisting of its devices (via The Verge) by explaining, “when we detect that the user is running applications like games or 3D Benchmarks that require high performance, we allow the SoC to run at full speed for the smoothest experience.” This would be fine and dandy if the user could control this “performance mode” and run that mode continuously without the phone melting from the heat. However, that does not appear to be the case.
With all that in mind, the delisting of these OPPO phones isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is that it took three weeks before UL delisted the phones, as the TECH2 article was published on September 28.
During TECH2‘s testing, it also discovered devices from HMD Global, Samsung, OnePlus, and Xiaomi were not cheating with their scores.