UL Benchmarks has announced that four Huawei phones, including the popular P20 and P20 Pro flagships, have been delisted from its 3DMark rankings. The decision comes after the Chinese smartphone maker, which recently surpassed Apple to become the second largest smartphone vendor in the world, was found to have cheated in order to get higher scores.

The discovery was initially made by AnandTech earlier this week, which prompted the company behind the benchmarking tool to conduct their own testing. In order to determine if Huawei had tricked the system, the company used two versions - the publicly available variant and a private one that can't be recognized by phones - of its benchmarking app to test the devices' performance. The results showed that scores were noticeably higher with the public version of the app.

UL does acknowledge that devices adjust their performance based on the workload at hand, and these adjustments don't violate its rules. However, in this case, it becomes clear that performance isn't being boosted because the test is more demanding since the two variants of the tool are similar. Instead, Huawei seems to increase performance dramatically because it simply recognizes the name of the app. As a result, the fur following phones have been delisted from the 3DMark rankings:

Huawei P20

Huawei P20 Pro

Huawei Nova 3

Honor Play

This isn't the first case of manufacturers attempting to rig benchmark results to favor their own smartphones. Back in 2013, many companies were caught doing something similar with their devices. It's a reminder that benchmark scores shouldn't be taken too seriously, as they might not always reflect real-life performance.

Source: UL Benchmarks via TechCrunch