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Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

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Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#63
This is just what is expected: the vendors do this because they need to shine in these meaningless benchmarks because that's merely the name of the game. The tech magazines are in between: they publish results in reviews and phone comparisons but it seems that not many people really buy phones based on benchmark scores. They might give some overall idea of whether the phone is middle-end or high-end, but differences within one category tend to be small enough to not matter for the general buyer.

To fix this, there should be different runs for these benchmarks. A max-clocks run with the phone set in an actively cooled cabin to see what the hardware can theoretically do at its very best, and another run in non-actively cooled room temperature with the test running for about an hour to rule out any benefits from temporary boosts or ignoring thermal limits to get an idea of continuously supported performance.

Even those results wouldn't really tell much to the end-user. I always suggest my friends and relatives to buy a phone with excessively large memory and storage space because lack of memory and storage really is what turns phones slow after a few rounds of application and system updates.

The performance edge on mobile is thinning out pretty much what happened with PCs. Ditto for memory and storage. Early on, vendors competed on who has the highest MHz cpus but somewhere between 1-2GHz the performance got high enough in nearly any case. 95% of people could buy about just any PC or laptop and it would be "fast enough". There's gigabytes of memory in even the sloppiest laptop these days, and enough SSD to make things fly. The same will happen with phones which makes it impossible to buy a phone that is too slow. At that point components with lower performance and less capacity will become more expensive due to the lack of volumes, that no vendor will bother any longer.

Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#65
post #38
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktops have gone through it too: quack.exe and the HardOCP exposé. It’s been a long time since I thought of that.

Shader replacement was extremely popular for years - see AMD's infamous Doom3 shader replacement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1488/6 . NVidia drivers did the same thing although they were (generally) a bit smarter about it, relying on shader fingerprinting rather than application fingerprinting to prevent embarrassing "rename the EXE" expose articles. They were notoriously caught using a benchmark's camera path as…

There's absolutely nothing wrong with shader replacement. Quite the opposite, as it shows the OEM cares about performance. They have two options: convince the game developer to use a better optimised shader or just replace it themselves. The latter is obviously better.

Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#66
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not implying that at all. For some games that may make sense, but I think that'd fall under the sustained heavy CPU/GPU usage category for most games. Same for compiling large apps, interactive HTML5 PWAs and such.

I am now very confused about which usage of the term "gaming" y'all are referring to.

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Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#67

Yeah, Huawei also sells shitty phones with locked bootloaders. Not interested in any case, cheating or no.

I disagree that they are shitty... hardware and software is great. Their ethical standards maybe not.

Besides, if you want to install custom roms just get a phone that is supported officially (e.g. Pixel). I don't care about custom rom scene so it doesn't bother me that the bootlocker is locked. Though it was definitely a nice to have while it still existed.

Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#68

That's a shame. I got a P20 Pro and I really like it (even the software). But I don't think I'll get another Huawei next time, because the company itself is really weird.

Using "weird" as a euphemism for unethical, or some other problem?

Weird as in they keep doing shady things even though they don't need the shady practices.

Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#69
post #36

This comes as no surprise. This is a company who has also been caught claiming their phone took a photo - but left in DSLR exif data, claiming a phone had UFS but shipped EMMC instead, boasting to work with dev community - only to lock them out months later, among other shady practices. They make nice phones at a good price, but is not a company to be trusted.

I am not surprised as others have been cought doing the same. Anyone remember the DSLR in the reflection in a Nokia ad that was supposedly shot a Nokia? Have you seen the rig Apple uses? doesn't look much like a phone anymore but technically is still an iPhone.

Sadly the P20 pro has an incredible camera and would stand on its own without forgery.

All I really care about is that they unlock their bootloader. The marketing crap is always half truths anyway. Retina, you mean 4k?

Re: Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones

#70
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not implying that at all. For some games that may make sense, but I think that'd fall under the sustained heavy CPU/GPU usage category for most games. Same for compiling large apps, interactive HTML5 PWAs and such.

I am now very confused about which usage of the term "gaming" y'all are referring to.

[deleted]
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