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Graphics Software Hardware

More 'Application-Specific' Optimizations in NVidia Drivers 361

Posted by michael from the but-it's-not-cheating-so-there dept.
EconolineCrush writes "Futuremark and NVIDIA have been embroiled in a spat over various cheat/optimizations in 3DMark03 for several weeks now. Last week, the soap opera appeared to be over; Futuremark and NVIDIA released a joint statement in which Futuremark clarified that NVIDIA was optimizing its drivers for 3DMark03 rather than cheating. This story, however, appears to be far from over. Tech Report has uncovered a new series of optimizations in NVIDIA's Detonator FX drivers that affect image quality in even Futuremark's latest 3DMark03 build. What's more, if you rename the 3DMark03 executable, the optimizations disappear."
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More 'Application-Specific' Optimizations in NVidia Drivers More

More 'Application-Specific' Optimizations in NVidia Drivers

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  • well luckily for me I've renamed all my executables files 3DMark03.exe for some time now.

    Mike

  • So What? Who Cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis AT gmail DOT com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:04AM (#6131009) Homepage
    Ooh ooh I scored a 19341 on my 3dMark test so that means I can play Quake now?

    Aren't we smart enough not to be pulled in my marketing hyperzor?

    Tom

    • Re:So What? Who Cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by confused one ( 671304 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:17AM (#6131094)
      Uh, no. The mass market will buy the box with the prettier logo, The box with the lower price, or the box that magazine xyz (that they read) says is best.

      Sad, but true.

      Most people will shop around, to make sure the features they're looking for are simply there and work. Beyond that, they don't do the research to understand which version is better unless they're forced to.

      • Re:So What? Who Cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:20AM (#6131568)
        Why's that sad? Who really cares? Most people just want a decent card, and either don't care enough or don't have time to devote themselves to some absurd quest to find the perfect graphics card. You'll never get the latest technologies in a consumer-grade product, so as long as you're getting a good price and it works, why should they care? Stop making this out to be some monstrous injustice, because it's not.

    • Re:So What? Who Cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:18AM (#6131102)
      Aren't we smart enough not to be pulled in my marketing hyperzor?

      You are... I am... And a bunch of /. readers are too. But the millions of teenagers that grew up without technical skills but love games and subscribe to gaming magazines are looking at the benchmarks to decide what to ask for X-Mas and what to beg Mom to buy at CompUSA. I've seen it happen in person with a girlfriends younger brother. The difference between Quake II scores of 110 FPS to 112 FPS was a world of difference. Of course, the card with another 2 FPS was bought! (Not actual numbers, but I remember the difference was in fact 2 FPS!)

      That said, what NVidia is doing is cheating, plain and simple. No laywer or press release can spin it otherwise. Well, they try, but the truth hurts in its simplicity. Change the .exe name and the cheats dissapear. And they are not "optimizations" because when the cheats are working they reduce the quality of the rendered image.

      • To be fair, it is the /. crowd that 3dmark appeals to. 3dmark has never been more than a simulation of a game and as such should be considered useless. Games that people actually play are the only real benchmarks as they represent real-world results, the only results that matter. Nvidia optimizes it's drivers for games(benchmarks) and so does every other 3D video card manufacturer, is that cheating? No thats improving performance by tailoring the drivers for a specific enviroment. Thats optimization. Is com
        • Benchmarks are meant to test card performance. Optimizing for them is wrong, ok? Optimizing for real games is ok, because there's benefit to the end user (better game play). But for synthetic benchmarks, it's just fucking cheating and lying.

          Also, compiling for athlons isn't cheating, as long as 2+2 is still equal to 4, and not 3.96. The new set of issues (hell, the original set as well) involve the program not doing what it's supposed to do: Produce the best quality images. The first set found involve

      • Re:So What? Who Cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Slack-Jawed Local ( 599511 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:18AM (#6131554)
        Absolutely! I can't believe that some people are saying this isn't cheating!! Here's the deal, prior to any optimisation/cheating... App programmer tells card to render something -> Card renders it the way app programmer tells it to -> User sees what app programmer intended. After optimisation... App programmer tells card to render something -> Card renders it the way app programmer tells it to, but faster -> User sees what app programmer intended. After cheating... Programmer tells card to render something -> Driver programmer decides that, actually app programmer doesn't know what he/she is talking about and shouldn't have told it to render the thing that way and that they know a much better way to render it -> Card renders it the way the driver programmer tells it to, which (surprise!) is faster -> User sees what driver programmer intended. The point is that what the app programmer and driver programmer intended are different things. This, in itself is not a cheat. The cheat comes in when the driver programmer doesn't tell people about the change and instead let's people think that a difference in FPS between competitor cards is because of differences in power, rather than differences in what they are trying to render. It's a matter of trust that graphics cards render things the way the app tells them to. To do otherwise is cheating. Plain and simple.
        • Um, optimization doesn't necessarily mean that there is no user-perceptable difference. In graphics, one of the main optimization techniques is to degrade quality in ways that you hope the user doesn't notice. If the user does notice, than you get a bad rep for quality, but its not cheating per se.
      • You are... I am... And a bunch of /. readers are too. But the millions of teenagers that grew up without technical skills but love games and subscribe to gaming magazines are looking at the benchmarks to decide what to ask for X-Mas and what to beg Mom to buy at CompUSA.

        I don't know, I think it's more widespread than that. It's the same kind of fervor that surrounds arguments about the # of instruction units on the Pentium 4 vs. the Opteron. They're people with some technical knowledge--maybe even a goo
    • Not really. I expect NVIDIA to beef up their product claims and press releases as do all companies today, though shamefully.

      I do not expect outside firms to lie to me, ala Arthur Andersen. If Futuremark can not eliminate this, they will be useless, as the plainly see.

      I can't imagine the relationship between FutureMark and any company who makes video cards to be peachy after the auditing scandals of late.

      I think NVIDIA and ATI expect to be allowed a little play. But thats not in FutureMark's best inter

  • It's the reviewers' fault (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:04AM (#6131010) Journal
    They always use the 3DMark results as though it's some sort of holy scripture, and as though a benchmark can indicate how well it will work in a real everyday situation. Every industry optimises for benchmarks. From a marketing point of view, it's insane not to.

    The only reliable way to test is by testing it withthe applications it's used for. Get some actual games, and see what the frame rate is. If they optimise for those tests then it doesn't matter! It means they're oiptmised for real world situations.

    • Re:It's the reviewers' fault (Score:5, Insightful)

      by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:17AM (#6131092) Homepage Journal
      Hot damn! You nailed it right on the head!

      Sure 3dMark is OK for a rough idea of your graphics throughput, but like you said some take it wayyyyy to seriously. Unfortunately, the testing methods you propose (albeit rational) aren't quite sexy enough to sell cards. And certainly unquotable for the magazine ads

      "My solitaire looks so colorful." - Mavis Jones AARP

      I know you meant 3D apps, but these cards are used for 2D as well and seems to get overlooked in that arena at times.

    • Re:It's the reviewers' fault (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:25AM (#6131153)
      You are obviously ignorant. Among others, Dell use 3DMark when the determine what 3D-acceletators to buy. So cheating in it can cause financial damage/gain.

      As to the "Just use games to benchmark!". It's not that easy. 3DMark is meant to test vid-cards on demos that use future technologies. Games obviously can't do that, since in order to have reliable benchmarks with them, the games need to be released first. And fact is that games are lagging when it comes to implementing new tech. that's why we need benchmarks like 3DMark, that test those features that are not yet used in games.

      you and your like say "Who cares? It's the games that matter". But I think that cheating (no matter what's the app) tells quite alot of the company in question. The fact that NV has been found to cheat (repeatedly) tells me that they are scum
      • Dell use 3DMark when the determine what 3D-acceletators

        Yes, Dell shouldn't rely on these benchmarks either. Anyone who makes buying decisions based solely on generic benchmarks is a fool.

        As to the "Just use games to benchmark!". It's not that easy. 3DMark is meant to test vid-cards on demos that use future technologies

        Like what? The graphics card industry is a mature market now. Features aren't changing. We're just seeing more speed. About the only new feature recently has been programmable s

    • Re:It's the reviewers' fault (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:28AM (#6131167)
      By all means, hardware vendors should use benchmarks and games to optimise performance. A well designed benchmark will exercise a driver in a controlled manner in a way it will be typically in real life and thus is a good way to improve real world performance.


      But this is not optimising, it's deliberately cheating. That's what it's called when you ignore the settings you were told to use and substitute in your own faster ones, simply because you know you're running a benchmark programme used by consumers and reviewers to determine performance. Cheating may not a strong enough word - this almost amounts to fraud, claiming one thing and delivering another.

      • You would think the easiest way to eliminate this type of cheating is to make it a standard practice to RENAME THE PROGRAM before running any type of benchmark, game, utility, application or whatever. Once you do that, you are running just like any other applicaton, and you see what the drivers really do.

        Testing sites should make it standard practice to rename the EXE to some random name before ANY testing is done, and declare such up front on every test just so the manufacturers know it.

        It won't prevent

        • Unfortunately renaming is only a short term solution. It would be trivial for the next version of the driver to scan memory for certain bytes unique to the software or hashing some bytes from the executable file, or see what other DLLs it's loading or any manner of things and come to same conclusion.

          You'd end up in an arms race, the likes of which anti-virus and anti-spyware find themselves in today. You put in one measure and the opposition counters with something different.

          The only solution is for the

  • ...to profit off of their customers hopes and dreams. This kind of crap is really showing off the sorry state of our modern societies. we're scum. dirty scum.

    • Re:the lengths people will go to... (Score:4, Funny)

      by avalys ( 221114 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:36AM (#6131203)
      Hopes and dreams? We're talking about video card benchmarks!
      • He is complaining about the lack of ethics in society as a whole.

        I agree.

        This current time is looking alot like the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is when the divide between rich and poor was about as extreme as today. 99% of the worlds money is owned by 1% of the people! Ronald Reagan started this craziness and after a taste of greed companies and the wealthy can not have enough. Before he took office the rich were taxed close to 90%! Today my taxes have gone up because I had to take delivery d

  • Cheaters never win! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just ask Microsoft.

    Oh...wait...

    Never mind...

  • High or low level strategy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MattGrounds ( 540732 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:06AM (#6131025)
    What I'm interested in is:

    a) Is this indicative of a high level strategy by NVidia's management, who's marketing department is pressuring them to have higher 3DMark2003 scores than ATI?

    OR

    b) Has some low level device driver programmer (intern?) looked to get some easy brownie points by "optimising" the drivers for 3dMark2003 in a slightly clunky way?

    Either is quite interesting :) I've been a victim/perpetrator of both in the past.

  • Make NVIDIA drivers Open Source! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lieutenant_Dan ( 583843 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:09AM (#6131037) Homepage Journal
    If we could have the Open Source developer community review and improve these drivers we would not encounter any problems with them. The experience and integrity of the Open Source developer community would be vital for the consumer to take Nvidia cards seriously in the market.

    Benchmarks would reflect the actual performance of the card instead of skewing the results in order to garner favorable reviews.

    Only when we allow Nvidia to see the benefits of Open Source can we free the graphic benchmark software from the clutches of Matrox.

  • Renaming (Score:5, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:10AM (#6131041)
    I tried various tricks too. Oddly, renaming it to Outlook.exe made it crash.

    • Re:Renaming (Score:5, Funny)

      by crawling_chaos ( 23007 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:13AM (#6131072) Homepage
      Oddly, renaming it to Outlook.exe made it crash

      It also sent an e-mail with "I Love You" in the subject to all of your contacts. I wonder if the reason for delays on the FX card was that they'd renamed the burn-in application DukeNukemForeever.exe?

      Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

      • Re:Renaming (Score:5, Funny)

        by Carbonite ( 183181 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:47AM (#6131266)
        I wonder if the reason for delays on the FX card was that they'd renamed the burn-in application DukeNukemForeever.exe?

        Damn, NVidia's going to be pissed. They delayed the launch of the FX cards and misspelled the file name.

    • Re:Renaming (Score:5, Interesting)

      by IPFreely ( 47576 ) <mark@mwiley.org> on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:27AM (#6131637) Homepage Journal
      Oddly, renaming it to Outlook.exe made it crash.

      Actually, that is very interesting. Any bets you've stunbled onto an entirely different cheat?

      Let's say Microsoft wanted Outlook to have some special capabilities in the operating system. So the OS recognizes it and gives it special treatment. Another app comes along with the same name and triggers the "special treatment" but can't handle it. Ka-Boom.

      This also brings up the possibility of really screwing with these drivers. Go get another game program (QUAKE.EXE or whatever) and rename it to the name of the benchmark. What does the driver do to it?

  • I will take a wait and see attitude. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:11AM (#6131048) Journal
    You can't trust results for older games, and you can't trust benchmarks evidenlty. I think the best thing is just to wait for the new generation of games which will surely clear things up.
    It doesn't make sense to buy a card to run Doom 3 when the game isn't out. Here is a clue, when Doom 3 does come out I will be able to buy something as powerful as the FX 5900 for $150.
    I'm going to go into an offtopic rant now. It is sad that we have huge displays and crazy-go-nuts graphics processors on computers, but consoles will probably always beat PCs for game size. Game makers are too scared to release a DVD only game, so our games are limited to 700MB by disk, and don't even get me started on controllers.
    • Obviously you never played Planescape: Torment (5 discs)
    • Don't even get me started on console controllers, man do they suck, when will they just bundle a mouse and keyboard with these things.

    • Whatever happened to Origin? I can remember three distinct occasions where I upgraded my PC just so I would be able to play an Origin game (Wing Commander III, IV, and WC Prophecy). Point is, if you release a good enough game, people will upgrade their PCs to get it.

      Maybe we'll see Doom3 on DVD? It's a thought.

      • That is exactly what I'm hoping for.
      • > Whatever happened to Origin?
        http://www.origin.ea.com/
        Technically, they're still around. However, after being purchased by EA (IIRC), they lost (EA fired) the majority of their creative and technical talent. The result? Origin exists only in the capacity of endless UO expansions.

        > Point is, if you release a good enough game, people will upgrade their PCs to get it.
        This is no different on the PC than it is for anything else. Houses, cars, console systems, PC, guns, ceiling fans... when one doesn'
    • Scared to release a dvd only game? How about smart not to. Believe it or not, not everyone has a dvd drive. And what the hell do you care what a game comes on if its the same game? Is your life so important that you can't swap the discs 4 times so you can play enter the matrix?
      I'm not trolling or anything I'm just tired of people complaining about the game industry not releasing on dvds, its always the same people who also complain about them pushing newer hardware.
      • It had a real effect on Enter the Matrix. The in game movies actually looked better on console because they didn't have to compress so aggressively. I personally don't like keeping track of 3-7 game disks for every game especially when they all come in those cheap paper sleaves.

        Just to clarify I love PC gaming, but I just believe it has a couple weaknesses. This particular weakness could be addressed with a $30 dvd drive. When most gamers spend $100 for a soundcard and even more for a videocard it makes

        • The in game movies actually looked better on console because they didn't have to compress so aggressively.

          Game movies always look better on a TV screen. The nice low resolution display gives it a little bit of poor man's interpolation. Meanwhile, the crisp hi-res display of the PC means you can see every artifact in its ugly glory.
  • I hope this puts an end to the urban myth that ATI drivers suck!
    I'm finding that the 4x.xx drivers don't work that well with my GForce 440MX the TV-Out is screwy, the best drives for me are 30.82 I wish they would fix that instead of optimizing for pointless benchmarks! I'd rather have a driver that works than one that gives me a bigger 3dMark score!

  • Who cares about benchmark software? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:11AM (#6131050)
    Really? I mean, I've been playing 3d FPS games since the original Quake/QuakeWorld, and the only thing that has mattered since then is what kind of score you can get on a timedemo. I don't care if a card can get 200000 frames/sec in glxgears or the 3dmark tests - I care about how it works in the latest/greatest 3d FPS. In Quake/QuakeWorld, you *needed* to get at least 40 frames/sec. In Quake2, 60 was an ideal minimum. With Quake3, it changed to 125f/s because there were/are some trick jumps/moves you can only do with a minimum of 125f/s framerate. And of course, when playing online, your connection had to be able to get enough data to feed the card as well.

    So throw the benchmark software out, fire up Q3 or whatever, and let us know how the card really performs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Who cares about benchmark software? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:29AM (#6131168)
      it matters because companies use 3DMark in determining what vid-cards to put in their systems. It matter because there are no other benchmarks besides 3DMark that let you benchmark features that are not yet found on games. That's the point of 3DMark: To test features that are not yet aailable in games. Games are lagging behind when it comes to implementing features. Hell, Doom 3 is targeted at GeForce's feature-set (you know, the ORIGINAL GeForce. After that we have had GeForce 2, GeForce 3, GeForce 4 and GeForce FX)!
    • ...except that ATI has been known to "optimize" for Q3 as well. A benchmark is a benchmark, by any other name it can be cheated just as well.
  • If renaming the file changes the optimizations, why doesn't anyone (read: not me) take a gander at the detonator drivers and figure out what OTHER games it's tuned to?

  • Shades of 3DFX in nVidia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saden1 ( 581102 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:16AM (#6131086)
    If nVidia continues to have these bulky video cards which take two PCI slots and make noise like a whale they just might go by the way side just like 3DFX.

    nVidia is walking a tight rope and for the first time in six years I'm actually going to consider buying an ATI. Come September 30th there is 90% chance that I'll have an ATI card on my machine.
    • FWIW, I've had a Radeon 9700 Pro since December '02 and I love it. Used to be an nVidia guy, but I haven't looked back since. I was a bit worried about ATI's drivers, but the Catalyst series have been great.
    • It's not like you're going to use that PCI slot next to the AGP anyhow. A lot of video cards come with fans and you wouldn't think of blocking airflow by sticking a PCI card up next to it.

  • Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EriDay ( 679359 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:19AM (#6131107)
    Rather than an Nvidia problem, this is a benchmark problem. I don't know why people keep crying about this rather than fixing the benchmark.

    Why isn't the benchmark a supervisor that renames the real benchmark to some random name, then runs it.

    Seems to me the trick is to stay one step ahead of the marketers.
    • No good. It could also check, offhand, process name, filesize, gfx calls, textures, checksums, etc. It's hard to disguise that well, and ultimately should they have to?

    • Insightful? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:18AM (#6131555) Homepage
      This is not an nVidia problem? This is a benchmark problem, because they weren't wily enough to prevent nVidia from cheating tremendously and repeatedly?

      People are crying about this because they rely upon benchmarks as a gague of how powerful a card is, and make purchasing decisions around such knowledge. Sure, some of them forget that a %5 difference is meaningless in real-world performance, but that doesn't mean that the overall scores are meaningless. nVidia's last round of cheats pretended that the card was 25% faster overall than it actually was. This particular cheat ads between 8 and 18 percent to the total, with the largest false total going to the most expensive card.

      In other words, if you bought a $300 nVidia card on the strength of this benchmark, you bought a card that is %40 slower than it should be because nVidia went out of its way to lie about the speed.

      ATI optimized for the test, they re-ordered the way in which the card handled executions similar to the way someone might re-order their day for maximum efficiency. It was a cheat, but a minor one that only added 2% to the score. nVidia's cheat involved dropping instructions entirely, equivalent to doing more in a day by checking things off your list without actually doing them, letting the food rot in the kitchen and the dirty laundry pile up.

      The sad fact of the matter is that nVidia now has a big problem, in that their fastest card which managed to eeek out ATI's fastest cards can no longer claim that crown, and yet it is ATI's turn next to introduce faster cards. Their technology can compete, but can't demand the premium that graphics card developers rely upon to survive. Furthermore, this cheat comes after nVidia promised to clean up their act and remove all cheats from their driver. Not only did they cheat, they promised to clean up their act and yet cheated again in the very driver that is supposed to be clean. Their public image is bloody shot, significantly worse than ATI's was over their Quake 3 debackle. ATI fell back on their technology and released superior cards, but nVidia doesn't seem to be able to head down that road.

      To get back to the poster's original position, the benchmark should try to outsmart the developers, though being a test for future games they have to stay abreast of display technology more than cheating techniques. But blaming the benchmark not the nVidia for cheating is like discovering that during a Car-and-Driver top-test the Ford team took a shortcut shaving %40 off of the race course and congratulating them on their ingenuity.

      What they did was indefensible. They knew it, they appologized, and they did it again.

  • Lemme guess... calling it 3DLark03 or 3DFark03? ;-)

  • For a good explanation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by epicstruggle ( 311178 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:30AM (#6131170)
    as to why synthetic benchmarks are useful please see the following:Beyond3D [beyond3d.com]. This website is probably the best site for info on 3d hardware.

    later,
  • Does anyone else think it's a bit ironic that the link from the main page to this story, a story in the "Graphics" section, is missing its topic image?

  • ATI/Nvidia cheat, FutureMark is spineless (Score:5, Interesting)

    by T5 ( 308759 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:39AM (#6131217)
    Forget about Intel vs. AMD, RDRAM vs. DDR. This is the real political intrigue now. Two cheating hardware companies and the benchmark tool company who hasn't got the guts to stand behind the truth of the matter.

    Once again, and this can't be stated strongly enough - synthetic benchmarks really don't tell you what you think you're hearing. Indicative? Yes. Conclusive? Absolutely not. Don't listen too deeply to them.

    When this much money is at stake, don't expect to hear the truth from any angle associated with these companies. Remember, we're dealing with marketers and lawyers here...

    • I find it interesting that it was ATI that blew the whistle on NVIDIA, and NVIDIA that blew the whistle on ATI. Personally I hope they both pour more resources into auditing the behavior of eachother's drivers, so that cheats like this can be revealed.

      At least someone is checking.

  • Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mraymer ( 516227 ) <mraymer@nOsPaM.centurytel.net> on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:40AM (#6131224) Homepage Journal
    As some people on this thread have pointed out, if you're the type of person that'll plunk a few hundred on a video card based on its 3dmark scores, you have more to worry about that being out a few hundred dollars. Heheh...

    Most major vendors have been "optimizing" for Quake III ever since it became the informal benchmarking standard... I think Futuremark has blown the issue up a little since they weren't on really good terms with nVidia before this started.

    But really, 3dmark has always been a "gee-whiz" pretty demo of current graphic card abilities, but never a reliable benchmark. In fact, no one program/game can be a reliable benchmark, since performance must be judged on a variety of applications. Only then do you get some kind of idea of where the "real world" performance lays.

    The competition between ATI and nVidia is good for us customers; they both have excellent cards now. ATI has the fastest, while nVidia's drivers (yeah linux support is flakey I know) seem a bit more stable than ATIâ(TM)s.

    Really, between the two companies, it is hard to make a really "wrong" choice.

    So yeah, everyone, these aren't the droids you are looking for, you can go about your business...

    • (yeah linux support is flakey I know)

      Be thankful that there is Linux support at all. With any other company, you have vendor support, drivers written by a volunteer third party who most likely had to reverse-engineer everything, etc. You will NEVER get TV-out working on an ATI card under Linux for instance, and TV-in isn't terribly functional either.

      Really, between the two companies, it is hard to make a really "wrong" choice.

      That would be true if the hardware was the only issue. Since the software

  • i say please include application based optmizations at will, just don't do it for benchmarking tools...i would like my games to run just that little bit faster, imho i take no notice to benchmarks just real word tests.

    My Gforce4 is enough to run any games i want, and any future games i cant run then i upgrade to something the developer recommends...

  • Card change (Score:2, Funny)

    by S.I.O. ( 180787 )
    Dang! I just replaced my GeForge MX with an ATI 9700 - now I have to rename all of my EXEs from 3dmark03.exe to quake.exe

  • This is about trust and users (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the-banker ( 169258 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:45AM (#6131251)
    Users want to know how a piece of hardware performs. When a hardware vendor takes a shortcut it improve results against a specific benchmark, it is subverting the purpose of the benchmark and is unethical. By 'optimizing' or 'cheating', NVIDIA simply has created a situation where the benchmark is not indicative of real-world performance, and consumers lose a source of factual data.

    It would not surprise me to see that much of this is an attempt by NVIDIA to marginalize the value of FutureMark 3d 2003. If a benchmark isn't favorable to a piece of hardware, then make the benchmark a 3-ring circus with these antics - then nobody trusts the benchmark at all.

    A sad way to do business and I can't say when my GF3 Ti 200 will be replaced, but it when it is I will not be using NVIDIA. Apparently they don't trust users to make a decision based on an honest assessment of facts.

  • Image Quality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jade E. 2 ( 313290 ) <slashdot@perlstor[ ]et ['m.n' in gap]> on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:49AM (#6131271) Homepage
    OK, so changing the filtering settings based on executable name is bad, we all agree on that, but has anyone really looked at the screenshots they posted?

    I opened the optimized screen [tech-report.com] and the renamed .exe screen [tech-report.com] in two tabs and have been scrolling to each corner flipping back and forth between them, and I've got to say I actually think the image quality is higher on the optimized one. If you look at the book in the background, you get a hint of text on it in the optimized version, where it's blank in the renamed one. And the bevels on the edges of the desks are a lot clearer in the optimized one. And there's a really jagged edge on the carpet under the left desk in the renamed one that gets fixed in the optimized one. It's not all good, of course. There are some textures on the left wall that are brighter in the renamed one, but it's hard to tell which one would be better without seeing it in action. (My system gets about 10fps on that test, not really enough.) And finally the optimized one has one thing that looks obviously worse, and that's the cross pieces on the rear window, they're a little strange.

    So, anyways, even though it's bad that they change the settings to get higher scores on the benchmark, I'd like to know how to change those settings myself, if it improves performance that much and looks (arguably) no worse, or even better.

    • I actually think the image quality is higher on the optimized one.

      So, to make you happy, I will build a videocard that, when it detects a certain filename, instead of rendering the picture, it will play a video of a high quality rendering of the picture... That way, it looks great, seems fast, and doesn't need to bother with doing the actual WORK.

      More seriously though, the unoptomized one is much sharper. You might think it looks better because it blurs some of what would be jagged edges, but for that,

  • How about this (Score:3, Funny)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:50AM (#6131279) Homepage
    How about optimizing the driver for all applications???

    Or is that just being silly?
  • ...what is the difference between "optimizing for a benchmark" and "cheating"? I don't see it.

  • Benchmarks are useless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <<ben> <at> <int.com>> on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:53AM (#6131310) Homepage

    When I want to test-drive a new car, do I build a driving simulator based on the car and load in my route to work so I can see how it would handle during a typical commute? Of course not, I just take the car for a test drive, because sometimes the best way to test something is just to use it.

    Benchmarks are inheriently flawed because a benchmark is not what your buy the card for. Card manufacturers are always going to "teach to the test" by optimizing their cards and drivers for whatever the reviewers are using to review the cards. So why not take advantage of this and use popular applications to benchmark? The venerable Quake3 framerate test is one example of this, but I would arge that all benchmarks should be numerical data taken from the performance of real world applications. That way, at least those apps will perform as advertised, and any other apps that take advantage of the same features on the card will benefit.
  • Most of the pro-3dmark comments are pointing out that it tests future technology that today's games don't use. That's irrelevant because for most gamers because by the time you actually need those features you need to upgrade your card anyway! Look at Doom 3: my TNT2 card can't play it because the TNT's don't have hardware T&L. But even if the card did support it, I'd need a new card to play the game anyway.

    I could see people making arguments that DX9 tests are good because DX9 games will prolly sta
  • You can talk all you want about your fancy graphic card, but I'll stick to my tseng et-2000.
  • I mean, in this age were we are supposed to tweak the bejesus out of everything (just look at all the people with computers in refridgerators :) ), why not simply let the users choose themselfs?

    Just add a new page in the driver settings where you can add an exe-file and then allow the user to activate the different "tweaks/optimizations". It would be more honest and people who want more speed than looks would be happy as a clam.

    "But won't the user be confused by all the options?" I hear you ask. Maybe, bu
  • I read the original Extremetech [extremetech.com] article which details them using the beta version of 3dmark2k3 to "stop" the demo and move the camera outside of the normal rendered path which revealed that nvidia played with their drivers to take a load off the card by not fully renedering everything seen "outside" of the normal view. I would no consider this a cheat, but an optimization. who cares what is not seen by the camera? I give nvidia a pat on the back for this.

    On the other hand when you enable the 8x aniso fi
    • I read the original Extremetech article which details them using the beta version of 3dmark2k3 to "stop" the demo and move the camera outside of the normal rendered path which revealed that nvidia played with their drivers to take a load off the card by not fully renedering everything seen "outside" of the normal view. I would no consider this a cheat, but an optimization. who cares what is not seen by the camera? I give nvidia a pat on the back for this.

      You're quite missing the point. nvidia decided to o
  • If I rename my quake3's q3.exe to 3DMark03.exe will I get some extra fps? :-)

    Ok ok, I shut up....

  • Changing the executable name should be standard procedure when running a benchmark for public consumption. Ideally, benchmark developers would go even further and actively try to cloak their identity from the drivers, databases, or whatever software the benchmark tests. You might think this could lead to an "arms race" between vendors and benchmarkers, but I don't think so. To get away with cheating, the vendors' detection of the benchmark would have to be totally foolproof. It would have to guess right

  • Cheating 101 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by verloren ( 523497 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @01:21PM (#6133334)
    I'm surprised this comes up so often. I would have thought that by now NVidia and all the other companies would have big notices on the wall of their dev offices:

    "When cheating benchmarks, DO NOT use the name of the benchmark app as an indicator"

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