In a very competitive market, smartphone companies are always looking to one-up each other with impressive benchmark scores. However, Realme was found cheating to get that advantage. One of Realme’s phone the ‘GT’ has been banned by the Antutu Benchmark app as it was found manipulating scores to fool potential customers about its performance. 

© Realme

In a Weibo post, Antutu outed the Realme GT was allegedly cheating its benchmark test as the phone scored 750,000. However, the benchmark removed the phone’s score from the database and has banned the smartphone from showing any results for the next three months. According to a general translation, Antutu said that the Realme GT’s score was “not a manifestation of true strength, but obtained through cheating and other means.”

The phone was found using thread delay tactics to run a multithread test on its fast CPU cores as much as possible. The phone also “modified” the reference JPG image used by Antutu to manipulate the score. Instead of processing the image, the phone instead used mosaic colour blocks to reduce the quality of the image for a faster render and processing time. 

© Weibo

© Weibo

Antutu said that both tactics are gains the spirits of the benchmark due to which the phone’s scores have been removed and banned for a further three months. The benchmark app also issued an ultimatum to Realme stating that if the company does not change how the phone completes the benchmark, it will be permanently banned by Antutu. 

For companies manipulating benchmark scores is nothing new as they often use it as a marketing tool. This is not the first time a smartphone has been caught cheating as other companies like Oppo, OnePlus, Samsung Meizu have been accused in the past as well. There is no word whether other benchmarking tools like Geekbench 5, PCMark, 3DMark and others have also banned the phone from showing any results at the moment. 

© Weibo

Realme’s CMO Xu Qi Chase issued a statement on Weibo calling the scores “real data run under the current version” of Antutu. 

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