Phones used "artificial intelligence" to boost scores

Sep 8, 2018 12:10 GMT  ·  By

After Huawei's P20, P20 Pro, Honor Play, and Nova 3 smartphones were delisted yesterday by 3DMark maker UL, the companies have published a joint statement to address the issue.

According to their press release, "Huawei will provide users with open access to “Performance Mode” in EMUI 9.0, so that the user can choose when to use the maximum power of their device."

Huawei also said that the method used by their devices to boost scores during 3DMark benchmark testing was based on "artificial intelligence", although based on what UL uncovered during their tests the boosting algorithms implemented in those devices were most likely based on a pre-defined program whitelist.

The newest Huawei smartphones were pre-programmed to automatically allow far more power to reach the devices' SoC (system on a chip) thus giving them an instant performance boost and, implicitly, higher benchmark scores.

"To prevent confusion around current benchmarking results, after discussion, UL and Huawei have temporarily delisted the benchmark scores of a range of Huawei devices, and will reinstate them after Huawei grants all users of Huawei handsets access to the Performance Mode," UL said in their public statement following the discussions held with Huawei.

Huawei's devices will be back UL's list after Performance Mode is available to all users

Huawei and UL have also discussed a future collaboration on developing improved benchmark testing methodologies and standards meant to better suit real-life customer and manufacturer needs.

As stated by the press release published yesterday by UL, the Huawei P20, P20 Pro, Honor Play, and Nova 3 smartphones were tested using a public and a private version of their 3DMark benchmark software following suspicious results obtained by Anandtech.

Subsequently, UL found out after extensive tests of their own that the Huawei phones were scoring up to 47% higher on the public Google Play version of 3DMark.

The private 3DMark build however always gathered much lower scores because the devices were not detecting it as a benchmark app and thus were not enabling the "Performance Mode".