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Chinese Company Oppo is the Latest To Be Caught Cheating on Phone Benchmarks (engadget.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the fraud-alert dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: You can add another big name to the list of phone makers found cheating on benchmarks. UL Benchmarks has delisted Oppo's Find X and F7 phones from its 3DMark charts after testing from itself and news outlet Tech2 revealed that both devices were artificially ramping up processor performance when they detected the test by name. Oppo acknowledged that it always stepped things up when it detected "games or 3D Benchmarks that required high performance," but claimed that any app would run full bore if you tapped on the screen every few seconds to signal your actions. UL, however, rejected the justifications. It was clear that Oppo was looking for the benchmark by name and not the extra processing load involved, according to the outfit. Moreover, tapping wouldn't be an effective solution if Oppo treated apps equally -- you couldn't get consistent results. Further reading: Huawei Caught Cheating Performance Test For New Phones.
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Chinese Company Oppo is the Latest To Be Caught Cheating on Phone Benchmarks More

Chinese Company Oppo is the Latest To Be Caught Cheating on Phone Benchmarks

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  • I suspect mostly everybody does that! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Monday October 22, 2018 @01:21PM (#57518707) Homepage

    I suspect mostly everybody does that from Facebook to Volkswagen etc. so it isn't limited to technology.

    Just don't get caught I guess...

    • And that is why we need to call companies that do this stuff out and punish them. We need to reward companies that don't and also we need to appreciate companies like UL Benchmarks and Tech2.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Sure buddy! I have heavy artillery available at will but I tend to usually adopt a more diplomatic tone when I post on /.

    • My computer BIOS literally presents the option to cheat on 3DMark...

  • It seems to me that it'd be fairly easy to add a slider control in the settings app that would let you choose power-saving vs. performance. When full, everything gets the CPU's full capabilities. Put it right next to the control for screen brightness, which people already go to when they want a bit more battery life.

    Then you can publish any measured benchmarks you want, and claim great performance and battery life, while pitching the configurability as a feature.

    • Some devices already do that(unless they've changed it recently, Nvidia-SoC ones had fairly granular control over power vs. performance through a custom settings widget); and basically all of them do in the limited sense that they have 'battery saver' as an option that prunes power consumption in some areas.

      I suspect that the cheaters aren't primarily motivated by confusion about how to implement this feature, though; but by the desire to get impossibly good numbers: if there is a slider the reviewer kno
  • They copied the idea from Volkswagen.

  • GM also lied here [zerohedge.com] too. Never under estimate the reach of American companies.

  • Gosh, haven't seen that before! /sarcasm

  • ...that values being clever over doing the right thing, with a cool eye toward the consequences.

    Adding melamine to baby formula to jack up the protein content? Clever. Not so clever when babies become sick and die because of kidney failure.

    Ripping off designs from other companies? Clever. Not so much money needed for R&D. Not so clever when consumers find out there's an inferior product under that familiar user interface.

    Cheating on benchmarks? And so it goes...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      ...that values being clever over doing the right thing, with a cool eye toward the consequences.

      Adding melamine to baby formula to jack up the protein content? Clever. Not so clever when babies become sick and die because of kidney failure.

      Ripping off designs from other companies? Clever. Not so much money needed for R&D. Not so clever when consumers find out there's an inferior product under that familiar user interface.

      Cheating on benchmarks? And so it goes...

      No, it's a mindset of GREED over the right

      • Just saying: The melanine thing _killed_ babies, but also got the main perpetrators killed. That was something you can't get away with even in China. The state had to be seen to do something about it, and they did. With death sentences.
  • Years ago, when graphics cards where slow enough that text output was benchmarked, some magazine found their benchmarks on a particular test ran 3 times slower than everyone elses.

    Their test displayed the string "The quick brawn fox jumped over the lazy dog." with a spelling error. Everyone else ran the benchmark with the correct text. It turned out the driver maker checked for this particular string, and had a ready-made bitmap for this strong stored into the driver. So they could use a bitblit instead

  • repost [slashdot.org]

    My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?"

    It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 [google.com] and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tac

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