Recently, domestic gaming mobile phone brand Red Magic’s flagship models Red Magic 11 Pro and Red Magic 11 Pro+ have been accused of cheating on benchmark scores. After the incident fermented, various media reported different opinions.A few days ago, UL Solutions, which owns the 3DMark benchmark software, issued an official announcement detailing the reasons for removing the scores of the models involved, and its methods were also fully exposed.
The announcement clarified that the two models involved, Red Magic 11 Pro and Red Magic 11 Pro +, have been completely removed from the 3DMark performance ranking list, and all relevant running scores have been invalidated.. This processing will continue until the manufacturer proactively corrects the relevant errors.
The cause of the incident was a complaint lodged by YouTube user Saityo last month. The user publicly accused that the Red Magic 11 Pro’s 3DMark score results were abnormal. After receiving the complaint, the 3DMark testing team immediately launched a special investigation on the relevant model, and finally confirmed that its behavior violated the official rules of the benchmark test.
To verify cheating, the 3DMark team completed two sets of control tests.One group used the public version of 3DMark that can be downloaded from Google Play, and the other group used the private rebranded version of 3DMark that is not open to the public and manufacturers. The test contents of the two software are exactly the same, but the final results are hugely different. The performance of the public version of 3DMark is a full 24% higher than the renamed version.
The official rules of 3DMark have clear regulations.Manufacturers are prohibited from conducting targeted special optimization through detection and testing software. Any such behavior will be directly deemed as “cheating”.The 24% gap in running scores directly proves that the model in question only identifies 3DMark by application name and has been specially optimized for testing instead of performance adaptation for general workloads.
Once the system of the involved model detects that it is running the public version of 3DMark, it will completely ignore system security restrictions. Even if the hardware temperature continues to rise, it will force performance to the limit. At the same time, the phone will turn on high-performance gears like "Diablo Mode" by default, and the testing team was unable to find a way to disable this mode when running 3DMark.
But in daily use and regular gaming scenarios, this phone has a complete temperature control and frequency reduction mechanism. This also means that this outstanding running score cannot reflect the actual performance of the mobile phone at all.
During the test, the 3DMark team also measured extremely high body temperatures.When the model involved was running 3DMark, the surface temperature in some areas exceeded 50°C. UL Solutions specifically issues a risk warning that there is a risk of hypothermia burns at this temperature. It won't cause immediate pain, but the heat will continue to be delivered deep into the skin. By the time a user feels a sting, notices redness or small blisters on their skin, the underlying tissue may have been damaged.
In response to this matter, Nubia, which owns the Red Devils brand, also issued an official statement.Officials do not believe that their performance testing behavior is unethical. They say this is a transparent demonstration of the hardware's true performance. Unlike other smartphones, the Red Magic model uses an internal physical fan plus liquid cooling design to specifically cope with extreme heat loads.
Nubia official response
Nubia officials also said that users can fully experience the performance level corresponding to the running scores. By enabling "Diablo Mode" in the game space, players can manually unlock power consumption and heat dissipation limits that are consistent with those in benchmark tests, meeting the needs of high-demand applications such as high-end PC emulators.. Officials believe that users should decide the balance between performance and heat dissipation. The results of the benchmark test only reflect the upper limit of performance that the hardware can achieve when the user-controllable functions are fully turned on.
But UL Solutions made clear a different stance.The core original intention of the benchmark test is to allow users to understand the real gaming performance of the mobile phone in daily use, rather than simply displaying a "theoretical peak" that has no practical meaning. The Red Devils’ approach has obviously interfered with the objectivity of the test results.
As of now, the two models involved have neither rankings nor ratings in the 3DMark list, and are placed at the bottom of the popular best smartphones list. The official clearly stated that the 3DMark scores of these two models cannot be used to compare the performance of different models of mobile phones.
