Recently, 3DMark, a globally recognized benchmark testing platform, made the decision to permanently remove the flagship models Red Magic 11 Pro and Red Magic 11 Pro+ from its 'Best Performance Phones List for April 2026.' These models are produced by RedMagic, a domestic gaming smartphone brand. The reason for their removal is that during testing, these models activated a unique performance-scheduling mechanism. This mechanism completely lifted the restrictions on processor power consumption and temperature, allowing the phones to operate continuously at peak performance levels, even in the face of overheating. This behavior goes against the fundamental principle that benchmark tests should accurately reflect real-world performance during everyday use.

The incident has ignited a lively debate regarding fairness within the industry and the unspoken rules governing evaluations. On one hand, some users contend that hardware capabilities should be permitted to be fully harnessed. However, a larger number of opinions suggest that RedMagic's actions amount to deceptive marketing. This incident has exposed chaotic industry practices, such as special tuning of review devices to achieve higher scores and the pre-embedding of detection codes to manipulate test results.

RedMagic's risky maneuver can be attributed to the intense survival pressures it faces in a shrinking gaming smartphone market. The company may have hoped to gain a competitive edge through such tactics. Nevertheless, its overconfident cooling system ultimately failed to prevent these rule violations. This incident once again brings to the forefront the credibility crisis surrounding benchmark rankings. As a result, consumers are now placing greater emphasis on real-world user experiences rather than being swayed solely by technical specifications.