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Research suggests OPPO and HUAWEI cheating benchmarks (Update: OPPO response)
July 08, 2025
Update, November 2 at 10:54 a.m. ET:OPPO has released a statement toAndroid Authorityregarding claims that the company was caught cheating on benchmarks to inflate the performance scores of its Find X smartphone. OPPO’s statement can be found below:
Okay, let’s unpack that. OPPO claims its in-house developed performance optimization is the culprit for the disparity between benchmark scores. When the phone recognizes graphic-intensive apps (games/benchmarks), it allows the phone to run at its normal level of performance —notat an overclocked rate. Instead, when the phone fails to recognize a game/benchmark app, it runs in its power-saving mode, hence the lower benchmark scores when the Find X was tested against the unlisted app.
Original article, September 28 at 6:23 p.m. ET:A few weeks ago, we learned thatHUAWEI installs software onto its smartphonesthat detect when a benchmark test is conducted. When a benchmark app runs, the smartphone pushes its processing power over the limit in order to make the score go higher than it ever would in real-life scenarios.
When HUAWEI got called out on this practice, the companyadmitted that the allegations were true. However, rather than agree to remove the software tweaks, it said it would make the overclocking tweaks available to the end user, which would make its previous benchmark scores valid.
However, the results of a new study by a research team atTECH2suggests thatOppois also artificially inflating benchmark scores of smartphones by huge margins using the same technique. What’s more, the team found that several other smartphone manufacturers arenotinflating their scores by conducting the same set of tests.
TheTECH2team conducted benchmark scores on the following devices:
Instead of using the UL Benchmark-created3DMark appthat’s available on theGoogle Play Storeto conduct these benchmark tests,TECH2used a private version of the app that it got from UL. This private app is the exact same app as 3DMark — except the name of the app is different.
Since the name of the app doesn’t match with any recorded benchmark app, a smartphone that would overclock itself in the presence of a benchmark app wouldn’t start the overclock process for this private version of 3DMark. In other words, the private version of 3DMark used byTECH2will get real-world benchmark scores for a smartphone running a processor at the same rate that it would during any other normal function.
Here are the results for five of the devices. The black bars are the advertised benchmark scores and the yellow bars are the scoresTECH2obtained using the private, unbranded app:
As you may see, there are some wild discrepancies between the advertised scores and the actual, real-world scores. In the case of the HONOR 10, the real-world score is nearly half of the advertised score.
Now, for comparison, here is the same comparison made by performing the same tests on the five other devices:
In the cases above, the advertised scores are almost perfectly in sync with the scores obtained using the private app.
What does this all mean? It proves that two phones from HUAWEI and three phones from OPPO artificially inflated benchmark scores, while one phone fromHMD Global, one phone fromSamsung, one phone fromOnePlus, and two phones fromXiaomidid not. But it also suggests that advertised benchmark scores from some companies are more trustworthy than others.
We’ve reached out to both OPPO and HUAWEI about these results, but we did not hear back from either company before press time. We will update this article accordingly should we receive statements from either company.
NEXT:HUAWEI phones delisted from 3DMark
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